Free Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age by Walter J. Boyne Page B

for he was at the controls of the most advanced reconnaissance plane in the world, one of four Royal Air Force officers to be accorded the privilege.
    Dark-haired and so hook-nosed that his colleagues joked about the need to fit his helmet with a custom faceplate, Osborn flew with his customary precision, recording the events of the flight as if he were over Mother Russia. His last assignment at the Royal Air Force experimental establishment at Boscombe Down had prepared him perfectly for this mission, and he looked forward to the following year, when he would be making overflights of the Soviet Union.
    He picked up a heading of 270 degrees, carefully maintaining his altitude of 67,000 feet. To his left he could see far into Mexico, a place he intended to visit before returning home. To his right he saw the endless Texas plains stretching to the horizon. He had come to love the state in spite of the strange mixtures of its cuisine. Suddenly he wondered, How many square miles can I see from here, horizon to horizon?
    He had the aircraft perfectly trimmed and reached down to figure out the area on the small notepad on his knee. The radius he estimated at about 150 miles and jotted down “π 2 .” Pi was easy enough, 3.145, and squaring 150 should be …
    For some reason, the numbers did not come. He stared at the notepad and sensed that he was breathing a little too rapidly. Glancing up at the instruments, he saw that they registered a thirty-degree bank to the left.
    Thinking, That’s definitely off, he glanced outside for a visual check, realized that he was now in a steep, diving turn, and instinctively pulled back hard on the stick. The airplane was descending through 60,000 feet at 130 knots indicated and the g-forces from his stick pressure caused the U-2 to shed its wings just as the hypoxic Osborn shed his consciousness.
    At 13,000 feet, hurtling downward in the wingless, tailless fuselage, Osborn regained consciousness enough to try to use the Lockheed designed ejection seat. It failed and he was fumbling with the canopy release when the U-2’s fuselage dug deep into the hard Texas earth.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    July 15, 1958
    Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters,
Langley, Virginia
     
     
     
    R ichard Bissell, the U-2 project chief within the CIA, had backed Kelly Johnson from the start of the program but never hesitated to butt heads with him on matters of principle. Osborn’s death, followed the next day by the fatal crash of Daniel Chaplin in an almost identical accident, had created a crisis.
    “Goddamm it, Kelly, we’ve had ten accidents with the U-2, two in the last week. Everything points to the oxygen system. The first autopsy reports show that both Osborn and Chaplin were hypoxic.”
    Johnson’s face flushed. He was used to doing the yelling in any argument like this, but he wasn’t going to do any today.
    Bissell went on, “We only ordered twenty aircraft—twelve of them have had accidents. If this doesn’t stop, by God, I’ll pull the plug on the program unless we get a fix.”
    Kelly knew this was a bluff. The U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union had already brought back priceless information that revealed that the Soviet bomber force was not nearly as formidable as feared, but that their ICBM program was further along than thought. Nor was that all; flights over Indonesia and China had provided information that allowed the United States to assert its diplomatic efforts with authority. Besides, the Air Force had ordered thirty aircraft, with a provisional order for five more.
    “Rich, we’ve known from the start that flying at extreme altitudes required extreme measures in controlling weight. I’ve been lobbying for weeks to get a dual oxygen system installed, and every proposal I put in has been kicked back as too costly.”
    “They have been. I’ve reviewed them myself, and it looks to me like you are trying to make excessive profits on the engineering-change proposal. That’s not like