I was reading about the U2 spy plane while watching the movie, and was stunned to read what their pilots went through. Under the section "design" on the wiki page, they describe pilots' requirement to denitrogenate their blood breathing 100% O2 for an hour, then take off in a lightweight plane that even jettisons part of its landing gear during takeoff and fly a plane with very stiff, difficult controls that is hard to fly at low altitudes, then maintain their ultra high altitude during the mission within an incredibly narrow range of 10 knots of airspeed between the fuselage falling apart or the aircraft stalling.
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