as above

April 9, 2019 8:51 AM

Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology. Emily Hammer and Jason Ur created an index for photos publicly available in the National Archives. Enter the U2 Spyplane Aerial Photography.

see also The Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East - " The project is designed both to develop a methodology suited to the region, discover, record, monitor and illuminate settlement history in the Near East. The archive currently consists of over 115,000 (mainly aerial) images and maps, the majority of which are displayed on the archive’s Flickr site."

posted by the man of twists and turns (6 comments total)

I may have told this story here, who knows, but in 1970 I was standing in a meadow, under a ridge on Mt. Lemmon, outside of Tucson, Arizona. In the silence, there was a shadow, that made me look up, and a U-2 was directly overhead, and I mean, blocking out the light, and it was a complete surprise, an elegant thing. Smile for the camera!
posted by Oyéah at 9:02 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

as above

Needs a "sobelow" tag.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:07 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Luftbildarchologie, previously
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:39 AM on April 9, 2019

Settlement history of the Near East ..... by Jason Ur.

#nominativedeterminism
posted by Rumple at 11:58 AM on April 9, 2019 [7 favorites]

Whenever I hear about the U2, I think of Francis Gary Powers, the U2 pilot who was shot down and captured by the Soviets and became part of a historic "spy swap". Despite all the official declarations declaring him a hero, he was a controversial figure. Lockheed gave him a job as a test pilot (subsidized by the CIA), but several years later, when he participated in a book about the U2 project, he lost the CIA's support and the job. In 1970, there weren't a lot of jobs for "hot shot" pilots, but the owner of a radio station in suburban L.A. who was a big fan of the Military, and of Powers specifically, was looking for a way to improve the station's traffic reporting and get some positive publicity, and putting Francis Gary Powers in a small plane to survey the freeways during Drive Time did both. If there was any doubt that his reputation had been rehabilitated, this eliminated that. In 1976, the NBC TV station had acquired "the original Telecopter" from a rival channel and was looking for someone to pilot it and give live reports. Powers was the perfect man for the job except for one thing: he had never piloted a helicopter before. So he spent a few months off the air in intensive training (DON'T call it a 'crash course') and made his TV debut, covering fires, car chases and other live local spectacles in The Telecopter. I had just started working as the Assistant/Sidekick to the "Wacky Morning Guy" at the radio station when Francis Gary Powers stopped by to say hello to his former co-workers (and a couple of us who hadn't been) and I shook hands with a military semi-hero. It was only a few days later that he flew the 'copter all the way to Santa Barbara to get a view of a big brush fire. It tested the limits of the Telecopter's fuel consumption and on the way back, either Powers misread the fuel gauge or it was reading defectively (or he read a gauge that had just been fixed as if it hadn't) and coming over the Sepulveda Dam the engine started sputtering. Now it's an established fact that a helicopter with its rotors stopped will drop like a stone, so he looked for someplace to land FAST. The good news is the Sepulveda Dam has several open recreational areas, but the bad news was he could not find any that didn't have a lot of kids recreating. The Telecopter crashed in a brush area, killing Powers and his on-board cameraman, but nobody on the ground. I was at the radio station when the Telecopter's TV station covered its own tragedy, and had to break the bad news to Powers' ex-co-workers and prepare a tribute to air the next morning. So when I hear U2, I don't think of an Irish Rock Band, I think of a courageous pilot who crashed twice.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:17 PM on April 9, 2019 [10 favorites]

Now it's an established fact that a helicopter with its rotors stopped will drop like a stone[...]

Actually it’s an established fact that a helicopter can autorotate to a safe engine-out landing in a very small area (the rotor doesn’t “stop” even when the engine does). Though the descent rate until the flare is high, a big difference is that the dropped stone doesn’t slow to a stop before hitting the ground, but a helicopter does. Choosing to hit trees instead of making people run for it is a commendably heroic choice.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:01 PM on April 9, 2019