The base exists because in 1942 the War Department needed somewhere enormous and empty to teach Americans to fight. It acquired roughly 87,000 acres from about 150 families in the rolling oak country east of Marysville and opened Camp Beale that October. The name honours Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a nineteenth-century Naval Academy graduate remembered, among other things, for experimenting with camels in place of Army mules in the American south-west.

What went on there was not aviation. Camp Beale was an armoured and infantry training centre: the 13th Armored Division trained there from September 1942 until December 1943, and the 81st and 96th Infantry Divisions passed through as well. At its wartime peak the camp held more than 60,000 soldiers, along with an induction centre, a 1,000-bed hospital and a prisoner-of-war compound. It was a small city of timber and tents, then largely taken apart again.

The conversion came in 1948, when about 23,000 acres transferred to the newly independent Department of the Air Force for bombardier and navigator training as the Beale Bombing and Gunnery Range. It was renamed Beale Air Force Base in 1951. The surplus — some 64,000 acres — went back to public sale between 1959 and 1964, which is why the modern installation sits at 22,944 acres rather than the sprawl of 1943. Before reconnaissance took over, Beale had a Strategic Air Command past: B-52s arrived in 1960 and were reassigned in 1976, and from 1959 the base supported Titan I missile sites through the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron.

The simple answer to why the U-2 still flies is that nothing else does what it does at the price it does it. The aircraft reached initial operating capability in 1956 and the basic proposition has not changed: put a very large wing on a very light airframe, fly it above 70,000 feet, and look down. The current U-2S is powered by a General Electric F118-101 producing 17,000 pounds of thrust, spans 105 feet against a fuselage only 63 feet long, and has a range of more than 7,000 miles at a cruising speed of around 410 mph.

What keeps it relevant is the payload bay rather than the airframe. The Air Force describes a sensor fit spanning multi-spectral electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar and signals intelligence, swapped and upgraded across decades while the wing stayed the same. The 9th Reconnaissance Wing’s mission — to deliver persistent, integrated reconnaissance and combat power for the nation — is deliberately broader than photography, and it has more than 4,500 people in four groups at Beale and overseas to deliver it.

The trade is that the U-2 is a genuinely difficult machine. Altitude is bought with an airframe so light and a wing so efficient that the margin between stalling and Mach buffet at cruise is brutally thin; on early aircraft, flying at roughly 460 mph true airspeed, the gap between the two was about seven miles per hour. Pilots called that the coffin corner, and the discipline it demands has shaped everything from the selection process to the design of the suit.

A U-2 sortie begins roughly an hour before engine start, with the pilot sitting still and breathing pure oxygen to purge nitrogen from the bloodstream before ascent. From there he is sealed into a full pressure suit of the kind astronauts wear, and stays sealed for the duration. The visor cannot be opened. That single constraint explains one of the stranger logistics chains in the Air Force: food arrives in toothpaste-style tubes fitted with straws that pass through a sealed port in the helmet, produced by the Army’s Combat Feeding organisation at Natick, Massachusetts, which has supplied U-2 crews for some fifty years. Flavours run from chicken-a-la-king and beef stroganoff to sloppy joe, pasta Bolognese, applesauce and a caffeinated chocolate pudding; pilots typically get through about one tube an hour.

The suits themselves are a Beale industry. The 9th Physiological Support Squadron, which traces its lineage to the Physiological Support Division stood up on 11 June 1957 when the Air Force received its first U-2, is the sole Air Force depot for full pressure suit maintenance and supply, serving the wing, the Department of Defense and NASA. It runs altitude-chamber training and fields about 105 active-duty and civilian members.

The landing is the part everyone films. Because the pressure suit and helmet strip away peripheral vision, because the canopy can fog, and because the jet rides on bicycle-type landing gear with outrigger pogos that drop away on take-off, a second qualified U-2 pilot — the Mobil Officer — chases the aircraft down the runway in a fast car. Beale has used Camaros, Pontiacs, Subarus, Mercedes and Audis for the job. The car accelerates from rest to close to 100 mph in a turn to get into position, and the Mobil begins calling from around ten feet: height above the runway, centreline, wings level, what to do with the controls. The aircraft must be flown down to roughly two feet and then allowed to run out of energy; touch down too high and sensors break, float too long and the runway ends.

Beale does not receive U-2 pilots; it chooses them. Applicants come from any flying background — fighters, bombers, tankers, transports, trainers, other services — but must clear a high hours bar: roughly 1,200 rated hours, or 800 in single-pilot trainers such as the T-6, T-38 or T-45, or 500 in fighters, plus substantial pilot-in-command time and the ability to hold a sensitive compartmented clearance.

Those who pass paper screening come to Beale for a temporary duty of ten to fourteen days. The first week is interviews with wing leadership, a flight physical, egress training and briefings, after which a decision is made on whether the candidate proceeds. The second week is the part that matters: three acceptance flights, designated AF-1, AF-2 and AF-3, totalling about seven hours in the two-seat trainer. AF-1 alone covers flight-characteristics manoeuvres, a descent to an instrument approach and multiple visual circuits and landings. There is exactly one interview opportunity; candidates who are not selected cannot reapply.

Selection is followed by about ten months of training, including roughly three months of T-38 qualification and a 22-sortie U-2 syllabus, and a three-year service commitment once qualified. The T-38 Talon on the Beale ramp exists chiefly to keep this pipeline fed, which is why a supersonic trainer sits alongside one of the slowest high-altitude aircraft in service.

The first SR-71 arrived at Beale on 7 January 1966, and the wing that operated it was redesignated the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing on 25 June 1966. Only 32 Blackbirds were ever built. Sustaining them at Beale meant importing an entire parallel supply chain, because almost nothing about the aircraft was standard.

Start with the fuel. The Blackbird burned JP-7, a low-vapour-pressure, high-flash-point kerosene so reluctant to ignite that a lit match dropped into a puddle of it goes out; engine and afterburner light-up required a separate pyrophoric chemical igniter. The fuel doubled as a heat sink, pre-cooling bleed air before it entered the engines, which mattered because roughly 93 per cent of the airframe’s structural weight was titanium alloy and sustained Mach 3 cruise drove average surface temperatures to between 462 and 622 degrees Fahrenheit, with local hot spots reaching about 1,050. The integral tanks were sealed with some 10,000 linear feet of fluorosilicone sealant and still leaked freely on the ground, because the structure had to be built loose enough to expand across a temperature swing from minus 60 to more than 600 degrees.

That is why the aircraft launched light and refuelled almost immediately, and why the tanker force was bespoke: KC-135Q tankers carried segregated tanks so they could hold the Blackbird’s JP-7 alongside their own fuel. The performance justified the trouble. On 28 July 1976 an SR-71 set an absolute speed record of 2,193.167 mph and an absolute altitude record of 85,068.997 feet. Retirement came on 26 January 1990, and on 6 March Lieutenant Colonels Ed Yeilding and Joseph Vida flew 61-7972 from Los Angeles to Washington in 1 hour, 4 minutes and 20 seconds at an average 2,124 mph, en route to the Smithsonian. One Beale aircraft, 61-7976, had by then logged 2,981 hours across 942 sorties.

Beale’s experiment with unmanned high-altitude reconnaissance ran from October 2004 to July 2022. The 12th Reconnaissance Squadron flew the RQ-4 Global Hawk, with a 130.9-foot wingspan, a 60,000-foot ceiling, more than 34 hours of unrefuelled endurance and a 12,300-nautical-mile range — a machine that could loiter far longer than any pressure-suited human. The last Beale Block 30 departed on 7 July 2022, consolidating at Grand Forks before the airframes passed to Northrop Grumman for conversion into high-speed test platforms.

The U-2’s ending has been announced more than once. The Air Force has repeatedly proposed divesting the fleet and Congress has repeatedly declined; House appropriators writing the fiscal 2026 defence bill inserted language barring funds from being used to divest or prepare to divest more than eight U-2 aircraft. The fiscal 2027 request goes further, proposing to retire all 23 remaining Dragon Ladies by the end of that year, in a fleet whose average age now exceeds 43 years and whose mission capable rates have slipped.

Beale is being given a new reason to exist in parallel. From summer 2025 a battle management squadron of roughly 140 airmen began standing up at the base, working with the Common Mission Control Center under the 427th Reconnaissance Squadron and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to fuse intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data for faster decisions. The aircraft may go; the business of turning collection into targeting is being kept at Beale.