🐉 Slow Ride
[ca. 2000]
Where was I flying to? I don't recall now. It wasn't common post-1992 for me to take off out of Sacramento International (SMF), but I was headed somewhere. Typically I'd choose this if the price differential from any of the Bay Area airports made it worth the drive.
We were holding short of runway 35L, and we had been there for quite some time. We waited. And waited. What was the delay?
I had a window seat (I always choose a window seat to watch the world go by) on the left side of the plane. So I looked south—maybe there was a plane on final that we were waiting for.
There wasn't, but... no, wait, there was a faint, shimmering landing light way out there in the distance. Could that be what we were waiting for? It was awfully far away.
The flat plain of the California Central Valley extended to the horizon. SMF is just about smack-dab in the middle between the coast range and the Sierra foothills. Travis AFB was out of sight a score miles to the southwest. And Beale AFB was about 40 miles northeast of our location.
Beale was where U-2s were stationed, the high-altitude cold-war-era spy planes with the nickname Dragon Lady. The first U-2 flight was in 1955 and they are still in use today. They were slow at just over 400 knots, but they had a service ceiling of 72,000 feet. The idea was the enemy would know the plane was there, but couldn't do anything about it.
Tom is one of my best friends; we met in high school. Tom's dad, Richard, was a U-2 pilot back before I knew him. He eventually became an instructor out at Beale before he retired. Back in the 80s, Tom and I used to read his copies of Aviation Week (a military-oriented trade rag that would feature advertisements for missiles, etc.) and eat Nilla Wafers while Richard watched sports on two TVs at once.
I was pretty familiar with the U-2 through these channels.
The distant landing light grew closer. Still we waited, engines idling.
The U-2 has tremendously long, skinny wings. It has to have them to cruise up where the air is so tenuous. And they're thin, too. The plane is slim and sleek to cut down on weight. This weight diet is extreme: it only has single main landing gear dead-center in the fuselage; then—by design!—it falls over onto a wingtip when it comes to a stop after landing.
And now I could see the outline of the plane coming in for a landing. The radar-absorbing black paint drew a long knife-edge line on either side of the landing light. It was unmistakably the Dragon Lady.
But at Sacramento? At least this explains why it was so slow coming in. The U-2 approaches at Cessna speeds, not 737 speeds.
We'd had plenty of time to take off before the U-2 got there, but I had two hypotheses as to why we did not. For one, there'd be wake turbulence from the 737 that the landing U-2 would have to deal with. And I can imagine it'd get chucked around pretty good with those lengthy wings. And, two, the 737 pilots of my plane we probably keen to watch the U-2 come in.
I mean, that's not something you see every day!
Finally, the U-2 arrived and passed gracefully out of sight toward the right side of the plane. I don't know if it made a touch-and-go, or just flew on its way back to Beale after making the approach. I know it didn't stop—it would have fallen over—but, in any case, what a treat for everyone to see!
Except for everyone on the passenger jet who didn't care about such things, but you can't please everyone, can you.