The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft has seven photographic windows under the belly of the aircraft, which can take pictures from different angles. (Research Friends Object / Photo: Courtesy of Mr. Hyun-Ming Liao)
When Black Cat Squadron met GIS: Half a century ago, a group of secretly trained pilots risked their lives to fly the most difficult U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in history and infiltrated Chinese airspace for reconnaissance, but only about half of the team was eventually released from service safely.
Thirty years later, the classified aerial photos from that year, along with other early Air Force reconnaissance results, came to CTRC and were transformed into over a million pieces of geographical maps under the responsibility of the Geographic Information Science Research Center. “The researcher interviewed the executive director, researcher Fan Yi-jun, and research associate technician Liao Hyun-ming to unveil this history.
The Mysterious Air Force Reconnaissance Unit: Black Cat Squadron
Today, with the advancement of technology, one can view street information and aerial photos by simply opening Google Map. However, at a Time when artificial satellite technology was not yet mature, it was not so easy to obtain space information.
“This is Taipei City, this is the Taoyuan Air Force Base before it was relocated, and this is Lhasa on the Tibetan plateau…,” said Associate Technician Hyun-Ming Liao of CTRC, showing a black-and-white aerial photo map. In the photos, mountains, rivers, Bei ponds, airstrips and housing settlements are clearly visible.
These aerial photos, which have been completed in the digital collection, all come from a mysterious Air Force reconnaissance unit, the “Black Cat Squadron,” which ventured deep behind the enemy lines and secretly photographed them.
The story begins in the late 1950s, when the Cold War was still raging.
In 1959, an aerial photo of Lhasa, Tibet, taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane flown by a U.S. pilot, with the Potala Palace in the red box. Back then, there was no GPS, so pilots had to rely on paper charts and radio guidance to determine course direction and reconnaissance targets. (Photo│NARA Collection, courtesy of Mr. Xu Lin)
At that time, the government was still actively trying to “counter-attack the mainland”, while the U.S. wanted to reconnoiter the status of the communist camp’s missiles and nuclear facilities. Therefore, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Taiwan‘s military intelligence units worked together on Project Razor to secretly establish a high-altitude reconnaissance unit, with the U.S. providing U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and technical support and Taiwan providing pilots and logistical bases. “top secret.
In 1961, the 35th Air Force Squadron was officially established under the name of “Air Force Weather Reconnaissance Research Group” and was mysteriously hidden in Taoyuan Air Force Base, nicknamed “Black Cat Squadron”.
The Geographic Information Science Research Center (GISRC) is part of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Center of Academia Sinica, and Research Associate Technician Liao Hyun-Ming shows a black and white aerial photo. The image in his hand is an aerial image of Taipei City in the 1960s, and the lower right image is the Yuanshan Hotel back then. (Photo│Research)
U-2, the most difficult aircraft ever flown
In the 1960s, Black Cat pilots flew U-2 reconnaissance aircraft on numerous covert reconnaissance missions to China, Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula, and other front lines of the Cold War conflict.
The U-2’s dark, thin fuselage and long wings allowed only one pilot to fly it. To avoid radar and ground-to-air missiles, the U-2 flies at over 20,000 meters, twice the altitude of a typical aircraft (about 10,000 meters for civilian aircraft and 12,000 meters for fighters). In order to keep it light and not consume fuel, the U-2 biplane and tail can be detached, and the fuselage has no armament or resupply equipment.
The design of the whole reconnaissance aircraft is just like the name of the team, like a black cat that sneaks around in the dark and early morning, light and silent.
The U-2 is a slender aircraft with long wings, and is known as the “Dragon Lady”. There are only two wheels in the front and back of the plane, and when landing, a special car must be prepared on both sides of the wing, with long poles and magnets to mount the two wheels before the plane can glide smoothly to the ground, which is extremely testing for the pilot. (Photo│Master Sgt. Rose Reynolds)
However, the extremely lightweight design sacrificed the pilot’s personal safety.
The U-2 was extremely difficult to land; it was prone to disintegration at high speed and stalling if it was too slow (the difference between top speed and stalling speed was only 18.5 km); and in the early days, it often stalled at high altitude without warning, testing the pilot’s skills.
The dangers didn’t stop there!
To get in and out of enemy airspace on a single trip, it was not uncommon to fly for 8 to 12 hours straight. Pilots must also wear pressure suits and helmets similar to space suits, and eat and excrete like astronauts through special “straws” – in the low temperature, low pressure, lack of oxygen at 20,000 meters, without this equipment, the surface of the eyeballs will freeze, the body’s water and blood will boil and evaporate.
Only pilots from the United States, the United Kingdom and Taiwan have been trained worldwide, and only the United States and Taiwan have actually carried out the mission, with the latest model, the U-2R, still in service with the U.S. Army.
Military secrets turned into a “historical version of Google Map”
This mysterious unit quietly took on the heavy responsibility of reconnaissance, until the termination of the “Fast Knife Program” in 1974, 28 Black Cat pilots, a total of 220 missions, bringing back more than 3,000 rolls of negatives, 10 people unfortunately died in the line of duty. The Black Cat Squadron, which was classified as top secret, has since sunk silently into the torrent of history.
More than twenty years later, CTRC and the Ministry of National Defense signed the “Fly Away Project” digital collection cooperation plan to promote the digitization of old air photos and establish a related database. The U-2 aerial photos taken by Black Cat pilots at the risk of their lives are one of the important contents of the collection.
Instructor Shen Zong Li of the Black Cat Squadron. This group of pilots was on a highly classified mission and was not recognized as such. 28 pilots, 10 of whom died heroically and 2 of whom were shot down by the Communist forces, died or were not known. It was not until the 1990s that this mysterious unit came to light when pilots Ye Changdi and Zhang Liyi, who had been captured by the Chinese Communist Party, returned to Taiwan. (Photo│CTRC Geographic Information Science Research Center)
What are the uses of these old U-2 photos after digitization, other than long-term preservation?
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Yi-Jun Fan points out the significance of geographic mapping in one sentence: “Digitization is not just for collection, but combined with GIS technology to provide important basic information for researchers across fields.”
Although they no longer have military intelligence value, these U-2 aerial maps have unlimited academic potential: a single image can capture data on land use, coastline, agricultural land area, roads, and even the volume of houses can be calculated.
“Trail landed on Mars, and the topography of Mars can be measured through photos from different angles, which is called ‘aerial photogrammetry method’.” Hyun-Ming Liao explained that aerial photography images of the same area and different angles can be restored to a three-dimensional 3D effect through GIS technology to determine the height of buildings and mountains.
Google uses the map as a carrier, and data information such as streets and stores are stuffed into the map; the research team treats historical aerial photos as data materials, extracts information with research value, and puts them into the geographic information system.
Time + space, GIS produces historical data
The principle of “Geographic Information System” (GIS) is to use geographic coordinates to integrate all people, events, and objects through geographic space. Whether it is aerial photographs, ancient maps, streets, or land development, as long as the coordinates are aligned, they can be integrated into the GIS system. At the same time, by incorporating the time dimension, the spatial information of the present and the past can be seen at a glance.
Take a 1963 aerial map of the Taipei basin as an example.
The first step is to locate it. The research team scanned the aerial photo negatives and searched for reference points on the image (in the case of Taipei City, the “Presidential Palace” is the constant reference point for positioning); in this way, coordinates can be marked and the work of “spatial alignment” completed, and then stitched together one by one into a continuous The map is then stitched together into a continuous surface.
Once the spatial coordinates are determined, researchers can then target specific research topics, such as “green space changes in Taipei City” and “the impact of the Keelung River on flooding in Shiodzhi after cutting and straightening” ……, and extract useful data from the images. The images can be used to extract useful data, including calculating the area of green space, the extent of the river before urbanization, etc.
Who am I? Where am I? Conan-style tracking to solve the mystery of aerial photos
As simple as it sounds, it is not easy to do in practice.
First of all, U-2 photos are special!
The U-2 is equipped with an automatic camera that can swing the lens from side to side and take continuous shots. In addition to the overhead view directly below the belly of the aircraft, there are also side shots with varying degrees of tilt. In this way, the flight path of 300 kilometers to the left and right can not escape the U-2’s “cat’s eye” to ensure that a single mission can be photographed to the maximum extent, to obtain the most intelligence information.
The white device next to the pilot in the picture is the automatic camera installed under the belly of the plane. (Photo│Research)
The U-2’s camera can swing the lens from side to side to shoot different angles continuously. In order to maintain the balance of the camera body, the negatives are cut in half, with half rolling forward and half rolling backward, so there will be two large rolls of negatives for each mission, which will be developed and then put together. (Photo│Provided by Mr. Xu Lin)
“Because it takes 8 hours of continuous shooting, the negatives are very long, about 65 meters for a whole roll. When preserving them, they have to be cut into sections, and a section is a roll,” explained Liao Hyun-Ming as he took out the negative, which was larger than his face.
The whole roll of negatives is put into the scanner and scanned by computer automation with high precision and resolution. It takes about 1.5 days to scan a complete roll of negatives, and there are more than 3,000 rolls of U-2 negatives in total. But digitization is only the most “easy” part, the subsequent “coordinates positioning”, is the time-consuming and labor-intensive project.
The Black Cat Squadron’s flight paths were all over East Asia, and there was no GPS at the time – thousands of photos, how could we know where this was? What were the geographical coordinates? Which mission did it belong to?
Check back to the Department of Defense records, you can quickly decipher? It’s not that simple!
For the sake of secrecy, everyone was just a small piece of the puzzle: the pilots didn’t know the exact mission, only the flight path and when the camera was turned on and off; the development officers developed the negatives and didn’t ask for details; and the military interpreters reviewed the photos and identified the location, but didn’t record which pilot and which mission.
“It’s painful for researchers, we want to know everything, but because of the secrecy measures, the information we get from different departments is fragmentary.” Hyun-Ming Liao said with a bitter smile.
Producing thousands of rolls of negatives into a digital collection is a lot of work: researchers must cross-reference images, maps, pilot attendance records, interpretation reports, and CIA declassified files in order to transform a historical image with no coordinates or descriptions into a scientific study.
What did Chang’an City look like in the Tang Dynasty? Why was Ming Emperor Yingzong captured at Tumu Fortress? GIS Recreates Ancient Space and Time
Although the U.S. National Archives also has a collection of U-2 China scouting negatives, they have not been digitized to date. In contrast, Taiwan’s complete digital collection eliminates the need to search for a needle in a haystack and is invaluable to researchers of the East Asian region. “
GIS is not a panacea, but a very basic work.” Fan Yijun described it as the “basics” of academic research.
He explained that the integration of various spatial information through GIS technology, coupled with the time dimension, can help researchers construct a virtual “spatio-temporal framework”. Archaeologists, historians, and environmentalists can conduct detailed social surveys, observe the long-term temporal changes of settlements and environments, and even extrapolate from contemporary times to ancient times!
For example, you may not be familiar with the “Mutiny of Tumu Fortress” in history textbooks, but why did King Yingzong encounter an ambush there?
The “Google Map of Ancient China”, recreated through GIS, will tell you. Tumu Fortress is located in the present day “Tumu Village” in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province. From the 1960s aerial map of Zhangjiakou (before urbanization), you can see that it was located in a ravine, making it easy to be ambushed. The story of “Ming Emperor Yingzong’s personal expedition against the Warlord, but he was besieged and captured” became vivid in three dimensions.
“According to the 1930s aerial photo map of Xi’an, we were even able to restore the city of Chang’an in the Tang Dynasty! Fan Yijun proudly said.
In addition to historical research, GIS results also have a “living” aspect.
Once an old man was accused of illegal construction and his ancestral Home was facing demolition. He approached the GIS Topic Center and pulled out local historical aerial photos to prove that there was no illegal land occupation, and finally the alley was saved. Every day, the “difficult problems” from the public authorities are the “daily routine” of the Center. Fan Yijun laughs, saying that social service is also one of the responsibilities of the research team.
“We are not just a canonical collection, but also provide the most basic research materials.” Twenty years ago, when CTRC digitized Air Force aerial maps and built a GIS system, most people did not understand. However, CEO Yi-Jun Fan emphasized that, just as atmospheric scientists record observations every day, GIS is also the most fundamental work. (Photo│Researching for something)
“They traded their lives for it, and we helped them keep it.”
It took more than 20 years, and besides U-2 aerial photos, GIS Topic Center also completed about 800,000 old maps digital collection, and built the world’s largest geographic information database of China and Taiwan.
Asked Hyun-Ming Liao what is the most touching thing about his 20 years of work in geographic information digitization?
He showed a photo and said, “This is instructor Changdi Ye, who passed away a few years ago. That day, instructor Shen Zong Li accompanied him to CGR to see these U-2 aerial photos.”
In 1965, Ye Changdi, a member of the Black Cat Squadron, was shot down by the Communist Army in Jiangxi, and was placed under house arrest and labor camps for nineteen years. When he was released to Hong Kong, he was unable to return to Taiwan due to the political climate at the time and had to settle in Texas with the help of the CIA. in 1990, he returned home for his discharge and did not settle back in Taipei until 2016, shortly after which he passed away.
“They never saw the pictures they took, they couldn’t touch them, they couldn’t ask.” Hyun-Ming Liao said emotionally, but they exchanged their lives for them and we helped them keep them, which is an important legacy in addition to the cultural assets and scientific value.
In 1963, instructor Chang-Dei Yeh flew a U-2 to photograph the Great Wall at Badaling, but two years later it was shot down by Communist forces and its whereabouts are unknown. After being separated for decades and returning to Taiwan, Instructor Ye saw the reconnaissance photos he took for the first time at Academia Sinica 47 years after his mission. (Photo│CTRC Geographic Information Science Research Center)
Mission No.: GRC-178/Pilot: Ye Changdi/Target Location: Northwest of Beijing/Target Coordinates: 40°21’N116°00’E (Photo│CTRI Geographic Information Science Research Center)
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