Dragon Lady Gets a Nip & Tuck: Programmed Depot Maintenance of a U2 in Time Lapse

There are some really cool bits to this and some interesting side notes.

1. I saw this and I can imagine some of the comments folks make about the depot maint causing serious headaches if the crew that did the work did a bad job folks mentioned in other threads about the birds they got back.

2. This may be completely irrelevant or may be just the crew they filmed, but the age of the folks doing the work was interesting. There were a handful of young people, but most seemed to be in their 40s or 50s. Am I reading too much into that?

3. The DL is NOT a shy girl it seems. Must be the payloads she's shy about. I guess that's because the bird is so old at this point and I'd guess the major powers have ALL stolen the plans at this point for the airframe. Except the Germans. They never do anything like that to their allies.

Some questions:

1. What do they do for the replacement wings, etc when they do this sort of maint? Boneyard?

2. How long does this really take?

a reply to: anzha

I feel like this has been posted here before, but it was uploaded on the 3rd? Anyone else getting Deja-vu?

Yup, here

a reply to: Bfirez

shoot. I missed that. delete the thread as a repost.

a reply to: anzha

They don't replace the wings unless there's significant corrosion to them.

PDM can take over a year to complete depending on aircraft type. For the U-2 it runs just about a year. I've seen some aircraft run into two or even three years as they found problems during PDM.

a reply to: Bfirez

Lol. Was just about to call that one up.

But the one on the OP is a different video than mine so should be OK?

Damn, that looks like fun!

a reply to: anzha

It's been long enough since that one was posted, and it's a slightly different video, so it'll be alright.

a reply to: Zaphod58

They must have reused some B-roll cause I just saw a couple similiar scenes and assumed it was just a copy and paste job on the hosting. Lockheed sure puts out alot of great videos though.

a reply to: Bfirez

Yeah, they reuse some footage,so they can limit time for filming. Especially if another roll has something they missed, or didn't come out well.