How U-2 Spy Pilots Eat, Pee & Survive 12 Hours Sealed In A Spacesuit At 70,000 Feet F [hgZWRg8dK4n]

To fly the U-2, you don't put on a flight suit. You put on a spacesuit and then you seal it shut for twelve hours at the edge of space, where your own blood would boil if it ever failed.

At 70,000 feet, the U-2 "Dragon Lady" flies robert redford so high the sky turns black and the pilot can see the curve of the Earth. But that altitude comes at a price. Up there, without a full pressure suit, a human being has seconds to live. So the pilot is sealed inside one the same kind astronauts wear alone, in a cramped cockpit, on missions that can stretch past ten or twelve hours.

Which raises the questions almost nobody thinks to ask. How do you eat when you can't open your helmet? How do you drink, or go to the bathroom, locked inside a sealed suit half a day from jaqueline cristian landing? How do you stay awake, stay sane, and keep flying one of the hardest aircraft ever built a jet so difficult to land it has to be chased down the runway by a speeding car?

In this video, we go inside the pressure suit: the hours of pure-oxygen "pre-breathing" before takeoff, the food squeezed through a tube in the helmet, the way pilots relieve themselves weather forecast today without ever breaking the seal, and the brutal toll of spending twelve hours as an astronaut who never actually leaves the sky.

They call it the loneliest cockpit in the world. This is what it takes to survive it.

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