It's been a really fun spring to watch what comes and goes from the airport down here. For a few weeks, we had Predator Drones flying in and out of the airport. Recently, a U2 has taken up residence. Not something you see every day; that's for sure! Usually, it lands at about the same time every day, so Steve and I went out to take some pictures of it. One of the cool things about this guy is the fact that it only has 2 wheels, like a bicycle. On the ground, it has extra sets of wheel trucks to keep it stable as it taxis, but it leaves them on the runway when it takes to the air. When it lands, two support cars go whizzing down the runway behind it in chase, so they can tell how far he is off the ground (they're notoriously hard to land) and so they can replace the wheel trucks for taxi back to the hangar.
Great fun to watch, if you enjoy airplanes!
The pilot gets out at the end of the runway, but beforehand, they put a canopy over the cockpit to prevent any satellites from being able to get a picture of the inside of the plane. You can see the square canopy in the last picture.
Another interesting tidbit about this plane: to keep flying at its desired ceiling (about 70,000 feet), it must fly essentially at its maximum speed. At that altitude, its maximum speed is only about 10 knots above it's stall speed. That's an astonishingly small margin of error!
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