I was a twenty-six-year-old with a thousand hours of fighter time, who had almost died of disappointment the first time I saw the U-2. I looked in the cockpit and saw that the damn thing had a yoke, or steering wheel. The last straw. Either you flew with a stick like a self-respecting fighter jock or you were a crappy bomber driver—a goddam disgrace—who steered with a yoke, like a damned truck driver at the steering wheel of a big rig.
