Colonel Merryl Tengesdal has the need for speed. The Bronx-born Top Gun is the first Black woman to pilot the US Air Force’s U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane.
“I always knew that I wanted to boldly go where no one has gone before,” Tengesdal said, and in Shatter the Sky she has advice for young aviators who want to follow in her path: “Don't listen to adults who tell you it's never going to happen. They're friggin' idiots."
Spy pilot
Tengesdal was born in 1971 and raised in a New York City public housing project. Her junior high school science teacher was an early mentor and father figure when her parents divorced.
Merryl knew she wasn’t like the other girls. She preferred GI Joe dolls to Barbie, liked sports, and dreamed about becoming an astronaut so, at the age of seven, she plotted her strategy. Merryl would focus on math and study electrical engineering at the University of New Haven to set her up for the next step - flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas. She got ‘winged’ in ‘96 and flew helicopters out of Pensacola, Florida.
Tengesdal excelled as a Naval Aviator and later as a T-6A Instructor Pilot. Her transition to the US Air Force involved serving in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in the early 2000s. She was in awe of the U-2 jets and couldn’t wait to put on the air pressure suit and soar to 70,000 feet. (Tengesdal would later recall how cool it was to pilot a U-2 at night and watch a shooting star beneath her aircraft.)
Tengesdal knew that navigating a U-2 was no small feat, demanding precise control, especially during the counterintuitive landing that requires stalling at two feet, but she liked to test herself.
In 2004, she smashed barriers by becoming the first African-American woman to pilot the U-2 jet, amassing more than 3,400 flight hours, with 330 in combat, in missions that crisscrossed the globe from South Korea to Iraq. Her missions - as with all U-2 missions - remain classified.
The classic Cold War spy planes are still flying today: "You can't mess with perfection. It's a great platform, that's why it stuck around and has lived through the times," Tengesdal said after making history at Beale Air Force Base.
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Colonel Merryl Tengesdal has the need for speed. The Bronx-born Top Gun is the first Black woman to pilot the US Air Force’s U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane.
“I always knew that I wanted to boldly go where no one has gone before,” Tengesdal said, and in Shatter the Sky she has advice for young aviators who want to follow in her path: “Don't listen to adults who tell you it's never going to happen. They're friggin' idiots."
Spy pilot
Tengesdal was born in 1971 and raised in a New York City public housing project. Her junior high school science teacher was an early mentor and father figure when her parents divorced.
Merryl knew she wasn’t like the other girls. She preferred GI Joe dolls to Barbie, liked sports, and dreamed about becoming an astronaut so, at the age of seven, she plotted her strategy. Merryl would focus on math and study electrical engineering at the University of New Haven to set her up for the next step - flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas. She got ‘winged’ in ‘96 and flew helicopters out of Pensacola, Florida.
Tengesdal excelled as a Naval Aviator and later as a T-6A Instructor Pilot. Her transition to the US Air Force involved serving in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in the early 2000s. She was in awe of the U-2 jets and couldn’t wait to put on the air pressure suit and soar to 70,000 feet. (Tengesdal would later recall how cool it was to pilot a U-2 at night and watch a shooting star beneath her aircraft.)
Tengesdal knew that navigating a U-2 was no small feat, demanding precise control, especially during the counterintuitive landing that requires stalling at two feet, but she liked to test herself.
In 2004, she smashed barriers by becoming the first African-American woman to pilot the U-2 jet, amassing more than 3,400 flight hours, with 330 in combat, in missions that crisscrossed the globe from South Korea to Iraq. Her missions - as with all U-2 missions - remain classified.
The classic Cold War spy planes are still flying today: "You can't mess with perfection. It's a great platform, that's why it stuck around and has lived through the times," Tengesdal said after making history at Beale Air Force Base.
Lockheed’s U-2S is a solitary, single-engine, high-altitude/near space reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft that delivers signals, imagery, and electronic measurements, along with signature-intelligence capabilities. That’s why The Dragon Lady was one of the assets used to collect intelligence on a Chinese government 'spy balloon' as it floated across Canada and the US in early 2023.
Initially, the CIA and Air Force used the single-seat, high-altitude jets to monitor electronic emissions and sample the upper atmosphere for evidence of nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and ‘60s. U-2 pilots also photographed Cold War enemy sites. The spy planes came to the public’s attention In 1960 when an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet airspace, a shocking incident recounted in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.
When Spielberg was shooting Bridge of Spies in 2015, he wanted a close-up of U-2 landing procedures so Tengesdal invited the Hollywood director to join her in a mobile chase car to watch one of the US pilots doing 'touch and gos' for the cameras. Spielberg must have figured he'd seen enough and told Tengesdal he wanted to get out of the car, she recalled in her autobiography Shatter the Sky.
"That's when I said something to Spielberg that he's probably not used to hearing. 'No, you can't do that.' There followed an uncomfortable silence that lasted at least a minute. But I couldn't let him walk across an active runway with aircraft doing touch-and-gos and chase cars driving at 100 miles an hour back and forth,” Tengesdal writes. Instead, she drove 100 mph behind an aircraft, matching the speed of the incoming U-2, and got right on its tail to ensure filmmakers could grab the best camera shot.
Spielberg was jubilant. "That was awesome!" he repeated several times. It would be Tengesdal’s last brush with showbiz until she appeared as a competitor on the CBS show Tough as Nails.
Tengesdal shares the plane's nickname, The Dragon Lady
Dreams come true
Tengesdal didn’t forget her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut but as she grew older she had another dream: raising a family. Flynn Obari Tengesdal was born in 2012. His middle name, Obari, is a Nigerian name that means 'mighty'. When Flynn was two years old, the Air Force gave Tengesdal a non-voluntary deployment order and the only way to avoid going to Afghanistan was to retire.
She'd done more than 20 years in the military. She figured it was time. With the intervention of a senior officer, Tengesdal served several more years in the office of Air Force Inspector General, retiring in November 2017 with the rank of US Air Force Colonel.
Off-camera, Tengesdal now wears the hat of a fitness trainer and motivational speaker. She has plenty of other advice for aspiring young aviators: embrace passion and mission, even in the face of uncertainty.
"I wanted to be an astronaut so I wanted to see how high I could actually go,” Tengesdal said in a Nellis Air Force Base interview. “I didn't make it but man, the journey was incredible."
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