Cliff Beeler

The stories developing about Bowe Bergdahl, his father and our CIC, all over the right-o-sphere are making me ill. Salacious indeed designed to take the place of scandal in a news cycle-minded political class. It has politics written all through it. I can hardly bear another word. Thankfully, there is an antidote. What time is it? Time to take a cure. Here is its opposite, a restorative to faith in human nature.

Introduction to Cliff Beeler, U2 pilot, quiet unassuming and unsung hero.

When an airplane stalls midair it can spell catastrophe if there is not enough altitude to recover. An airplane stall is not the same as a car engine stall as you might imagine, it does not refer to the engine, rather, an airplane stall refers to insufficient air flow over the wings causing the wings to stop flying. The plane stops flying midair. (Oddly, I learned this from a Navy pilot in a small consumer airplane after my dad had retired. And learned it again through hang gliding. Maybe I was taught that earlier but I was thinking of something else at the time.) If there is sufficient altitude then the plane can recover by diving but it is the last thing a pilot wants to have happen. Sometimes you see daredevils do this at air shows and it is also part of a pilot's training. From a pilot's point of view it is very brave indeed to induce a stall. Or stupid.

Regarding the U2 program.

As a plane climbs in altitude and the air thins, it must go faster to avoid a stall. The higher it climbs, the faster it needs to fly.

This is true at Denver airports as well. Some days the air is too hot and too thin to take off effectively. You have to go faster than usual to climb, and then the plane climbs more slowly than usual with greater difficulty. You need sufficient power to do this.

Above 70,000 feet, the critical stall speed approaches the plane’s Mach speed, or the speed of sound — somewhere above 650 mph at that altitude. If that barrier is crossed, the shock waves can break the plane apart. U-2 pilots usually had a window of less than 12 mph between the two speeds. They had to keep the plane within that window for hours at a time.

Focus!

That's 12 mph (they use knots) at 650 mph. One second loss of focus, just one second, and this happens:

He was above Louisiana on a night flight when he reached Mach speed. “It tore the tail off,” he said. “The plane flipped over, and that tore the wing off.” The plane fell apart, he said, and at 78,000 feet, “I’m out in space. That’s a long way down.” Fortunately, he was in a pressure suit with oxygen and had a parachute. After a long freefall, he opened his chute and found himself floating toward the ground. To his right, he could see lights on the ground. To his left, the same. But beneath him, all was black. He remembered he was over Louisiana “I said, ‘That looks like a swamp.’ ”  

It was. “I landed in a big cypress tree,” he said. “My chute got caught and swung me into the trunk.” Telling the story, Beeler reached down toward his calf, “I always kept a doublebladed knife in my pocket,” he said. He was able to cut himself free of the parachute and use the ties to lash himself to the tree. He took off his helmet and dropped it into the darkness below. There was a distant splash. “All I could think about was alligators and cottonmouths in the swamp,” he said. Lucky for Beeler, the breakup of his plane had been spotted on radar. Within an hour and a half a rescue helicopter was overhead.

Beeler describes another close call over cuba. He describes a MiG flying at 50,000, peak for that aircraft, occasionally a MiG pilot will flip on their afterburner and soar straight upward beyond their aircraft's effective operating capability. Beeler looked back and saw the aircraft tumbling in the air within 50 feet of his wing. 

Darn, those spy cameras sure do take enviable pictures. I've read about these all my life and now here is Beeler confirming them on point. 

During one Cuban mission, Beeler spent some time following the coastline. Afterward, he was called into the lab by the man in charge of analyzing the film. “He showed me a picture of this Cuban gal sunbathing nude on the beach,” Beeler said. “It was so clear I could see she had blue eyes. (The analyst) said, ‘The only film these guys want to work with is your film.’ ” 

Returning from another mission, he took some images over San Diego. Later, he was shown a photo of a man sitting in his backyard reading the paper.
“I could read the headline on the newspaper,” he said.

The full interview here at EAA pdf upload 

Beeler landed his U2 on an aircraft carrier following a mission over USSR. Let that sink in. It is an amazing feat. To keep weight down the U2 was originally designed without landing gear. It is basically a jet propelled glider. It was designed with skids in place of wheels. Later production U2s do have wheels, but they are more like a bicycle and require accompanying vehicles to land. Due to the plane's 80 foot wingspan Beeler's carrier landing was possible only because of the ship's forward speed along with a headwind. Beeler stopped the U2 just five feet from the ship's superstructure. Quite an astonishing feat. Beeler relates there is little about the Navy that he appreciates, but he does like their Navy pilot's leather flight jackets. They gave him one. He recently passed the prize jacket along to his son.

Wow. I had such a jacket but not for any special feat I performed and not from anything directly authentic. It came from one of my uncles and it was old and cracked and discolored. Nobody wanted it. I shinned it up with brown shoe polish and laboriously brushed it all over and had the lining replaced. Then my older brother took it. 

The photographs accompanying the article makes me a bit sad, conflicted, actually. They appear to be taken in a nursing home. It is the interior design features that get me. A very old man with trouble standing upright, aided with a walker. One photograph of Beeler in front of photographs of U2 planes. 

I look back at my own immature impatience with men like this, willing to relate directly to me their own stories, at Air Force Bases, at VFWs and such, in our home, and my own inability to understand or to appreciate what is handed to me in terms of history and my stupid inability to grasp its relevance. I fell shame now mixed with gratitude.

Beeler went on to teach a new generation of pilots, and they went on to teach yet fresher pilots and so on, and my spirit is lifted by knowing that, yes, heroes like Beeler do still exist. Quiet heroes seeking no glory filling the background of our own lives.

Experimental Aircraft Association