Meet America’s First Black Female U-2 Spy Plane Pilot - the Woman Who Said ‘No’ to Spielberg

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.

‍