A top-secret US spy plane has been spotted flying at an altitude of 60,000ft over Scotland. The Lockheed U-2S ‘Dragon Lady’, used for collecting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, was tracked looming about twice as high as commercial airliners.
The craft operates ’24/7/365′ to ensure global security, delivering high-level intelligence data for the US Air Force, CIA and NASA.
Its Dragon Lady moniker derives from a 1930s’ comic strip character of the 1930s Terry and the Pirates. Plane spotters across the UK identified the spy plane on global flight tracking service Flightradar24 as it flew over the Rosneath Peninsula in Argyll and Bute.
The aircraft is typically based at the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale Air Force Base in California, but is deployed on worldwide operations. The fleet regularly operates from RAF airbases, RAF Fairford in the UK and further afield from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
It was manufactured during the Cold War to gather reconnaissance info on Soviet military operations through imagery, taking its first flight in July 1956.
The aircraft is one of the longest-serving in the US military, flying from allied bases around the world, including the aforementioned UK and Cyprus as well as France, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Pakistan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Thailand and South Korea.
Dragon Lady is capable of soaring to 70,000 feet with pilots wearing full-pressure suits, similar to astronauts, to protect them from the extreme conditions at their high altitudes.
The craft was previously clocked at 60,000ft above the Ayrshire coast earlier this year, in January, on its way to RAF Fairford.
The U-2 was at the centre of one of the most tense times between the US and the Soviet Union when, in 1960s, the spl plane was shot down over Russia.
President Dwight Eisenhower, told that the pilot Gary Powers could not have survived, OK’d a cover story that it was a NASA aircraft had got lost.
However, to much embarrassment, the Soviets later revealed that Powers was alive and that he had confessed to spying (ilots were told if captured “to tell them everything that they knew”, because they were told little about their missions other than targets on maps).
The debris of Powers’s aircraft was used to design a copy under the name Beriev S-13. That was then discarded in favor of the MiG-25R and reconnaissance satellites.