AT AREA 51, Chuck Maultsby was following in the footsteps of an elite cadre of airmen who had completed the program before him. Over one hundred American pilots and a few more from the British Royal Air Force and the Taiwanese Republic of China Air Force had already trained on the U-2, including Major Rudy Anderson, Major Steve Heyser, and Captain Jerry McIlmoyle.
Richard “Steve” Heyser grew up in Apalachicola, Florida, spending much of his free time hunting and fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. His father had served as a pilot in the US Coast Guard Auxiliary, and Heyser basically grew up around pilots and their planes at nearby Tyndall Field. Upon graduating high school he enlisted in the army and, after serving his hitch, went to college, graduating from Florida State University. Heyser was smart and witty, with a high forehead and receding hairline that made him look older. A detail-driven young man, he eventually joined the air force and flew combat missions during the Korean War. His training with U-2s had begun in 1957 alongside Rudy Anderson.
Anderson was an equally impressive pilot and extremely focused on his air force career. Captain Jerry McIlmoyle later reported directly to him and found him as dedicated a flyer as he had met and a smart decision-maker. Sometimes Rudy seemed a bit too intense and gung ho, but Jerry knew that genuine love of his job and country drove him. Rudy was ambitious, and his career was on an upward trajectory.
Before climbing into the cockpit of the strange bird called the U-2, all the “drivers” at Groom Lake went through ten days of ground school, where they learned, among other things, celestial navigation, a technique, perfected seven hundred years before, in which sailors had measured distances between celestial bodies, like stars or planets, and a visible horizon to locate their exact position. Now, centuries later, modern-day explorers would do the same thing in their space-age aircraft. The U-2 drivers learned to use a small sextant, as it would be their main navigation instrument for making celestial fixes during long overflights where cloud cover prevented them from locating their navigational points through the plane’s periscope. The airmen proved good students, and most learned to navigate by dead reckoning with an error of less than one nautical mile over a thousand-mile flight.
After completing ground school, the airmen were taken to the heavily guarded hangar for their first up-close-and-personal view of the U-2. The aircraft, with its unusual design, pogo sticks, and condor-like wingspan, was a bizarre sight. The pilots got accustomed to the U-2’s low-altitude flights and touch-and-go landings with instruction from Groom Lake’s mobile control officer, who taught them when to add power, when to level off, and how to land. Exercising their final days of bodily freedom before donning the uncomfortable, partially pressurized flight suits that would keep them alive at ultrahigh altitudes, most of the pilots made these initial flights wearing their favorite Levi’s and a pair of street shoes. Like everything else in this program, the flight suits were a government secret worthy of James Bond.
For their fittings, the pilots were flown not to a military base but to the small city of Worcester, Massachusetts, where a driver delivered them to the David Clark Company, a huge factory that manufactured women’s underwear. Jerry McIlmoyle, who went through the process in 1958, was ordered to wear only civilian clothes during the trip. No military uniforms were allowed—not even GI-issue underwear. He was also to travel with no military documents or identification. Upon arrival, McIlmoyle remembers that a man who did not identify himself but was most likely an employee of the CIA awaited him and another pilot at the terminal. The man simply said, “Follow me,” and led McIlmoyle and his fellow airmen into an old factory where women worked at sewing machines in an open room as big as a football field, making bras and corsets. Next, the “host” took them to a green door, down a series of steps, and through a basement where he handed the two pilots off to a new man who escorted them to a black door. They knocked, and a wizened old man pointed them inside.
“Take off your clothes, all of them,” he barked. This was the “tailor,” and he had the pilots climb a two-step platform where he took their measurements. He said not a word until he was finished, then simply grunted, “Go to your hotel.”
The next morning the pilots were taken back to the bra factory basement and behind the black door where the tailor waited with two pressure suits. The suits were skin-tight, similar to a wet suit, and the pilots helped each other get into them. Once the suits were on, the pilots realized they fit perfectly. McIlmoyle was amazed that the old man and his team of seamstresses had achieved a flawless fit in just one night. He could only imagine how quickly they could create custom bras, corsets, and whatever else the factory produced.
The pilots knew the partial pressure suits could be vital for their very survival when flying at altitudes upward of 70,000 feet. Every opening in the suit had to be sealed airtight and the suit hooked to an air hose. Should the cockpit lose pressurization during flight, the flight suit would fill with air and become tight enough to simulate the air pressure per square inch on the surface of Earth: 14.5 pounds. The closed environment in which the pilots flew was also pressurized for this reason. A New York–based company was contracted to pressurize the cockpit of the U-2 to create an atmosphere equivalent to the air pressure at 28,000 feet. If the cockpit pressure fell below that threshold, the pilot’s suit would immediately inflate, allowing him to breathe oxygen through his helmet only.
The suits were designed for survival—not comfort. In fact, many airmen became claustrophobic and hyperventilated after putting them on. Along with their partial pressure suit, the U-2 airmen had to wear gloves and a cumbersome helmet that was prone to fogging when pilots performed their prebreathing exercises in the cockpit. Technicians suggested covering the face shield of the helmet with red plastic so the U-2 drivers could see more clearly. Although training flights were conducted during the day, most real missions would occur under the cover of night, so the red plastic idea was scrapped at Groom Lake. Urination was also a major issue for pilots in the skin-tight suits. The original models did not account for natural body functions. As pilots complained, designers devised an external bladder arrangement that allowed for release, but sometimes the device malfunctioned. One pilot was forced to “hold it in” during a long flight and, upon landing, grabbed a knife and cut a hole in the crotch of his pressure suit to relieve himself. The knife also nicked his private parts. It was a particularly bloody wound but the airman refused medical treatment. He simply wiped away the blood, slapped on a bandage, and limped back to his barracks. In any case, urination was infrequent, since pilots lost most of the water in their bodies by sweating heavily in the pressure suits. To prevent the need for defecation, pilots were fed meals high in protein, like steak and eggs, before each flight to slow their bowels. If they got hungry during long missions, they had readymade foods in squeezable containers. They could sip the bacon-or cheese-flavored mixtures through a small straw inserted through a self-sealed hole in the pilot’s face mask.
Air suit designers and aircraft engineers considered increasing pilots’ comfort and safety at ultrahigh altitudes the top priority. But there was no way to eliminate the danger posed by flying the U-2. In May 1956, the program lost its first pilot when Wilburn S. “Billy” Rose could not drop the plane’s pogo sticks during takeoff from the base at Groom Lake. Once airborne, he buzzed the airstrip and managed to drop the left-hand pogo. Rose tried another maneuver to shake the remaining pogo loose, when suddenly the plane stalled and plunged toward Earth. The aircraft dove into the ground and disintegrated, killing Rose instantly. Just three months later, Rose’s squadron mate Frank Grace, a thirty-year-old married man and father of four young children, stalled shortly after takeoff. He had climbed too quickly during a nighttime training mission and was only fifty feet off the ground when the plane’s engine stopped and would not restart. The aircraft dropped out of the sky and landed hard on the ground, then cartwheeled on its left wing and slammed into a power pole near the runway, killing the pilot. In all, three spy plane pilots would die in training accidents in 1956. The third man lost, Howard Carey, was just weeks away from his thirty-fourth birthday when his U-2 broke up mysteriously upon takeoff from Lindsey Air Force Base in Wiesbaden, Germany. The plane lost part of its right wing as it climbed, and officials later determined that the U-2 had been caught in the wake turbulence of four American fighter planes training nearby.
With every training crash, engineers and flight commanders went to work immediately to determine the exact cause and how best to improve design and train pilots to prevent a recurrence.
At Groom Lake, Rudy Anderson, Steve Heyser, Jerry McIlmoyle, and later Chuck Maultsby learned to cut back abruptly on the throttle as the pogo sticks fell away to avoid stalling and a potential disaster.
During his very first flight in the U-2, Chuck Maultsby realized why it took a sturdy pilot to man the fragile aircraft. Takeoff was the only part of the flight he enjoyed. During the initial sensation of ascending at a sixty-five-degree angle, he felt like he was piloting a rocket ship. Once at the desired altitude of 70,000 feet, he could scan the terrain from horizon to horizon and identify checkpoints miles away through the U-2’s drift sight.
His first flight was scheduled to take six hours. It was a round-robin mission, meaning that he would leave from and return to the same airfield. During the flight, Maultsby could feel the air suit constricting tighter around his body. He tried not to think about it. Instead, he busied himself with taking observations with his sextant. Despite his best efforts, anxiety continued to creep in. It resembled the claustrophobia he had experienced as a POW. By the time he finally made the approach to land, the feeling was overwhelming.
“Get me out of this thing,” he growled to himself.1
He touched the plane down smoothly on the runway—a perfect landing. Maultsby maintained a calm demeanor as ground crew technicians surrounded the spy plane and helped him out of the cockpit. When they removed his helmet, a torrent of sweat poured out of his neck seal. He had lost four pounds during the flight.