But still: The U-2 is a really old plane. And it’s not even the oldest plane in the USAF’s fleet. The earliest models of the B-52 Stratofortress and the C-130 Hercules started flying in 1954. In fact, according to Layne Karafantis, a curator of modern military aircraft at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., “The Air Force has six aircraft types that have been flying for more than fifty years.”

The Air Force’s reliance on old planes is an uncanny instance of a phenomenon British historian David Edgerton described in his 2007 book, The Shock of the Old. The book’s contrarian approach to the history of technology privileges “technology-in-use” over innovation, focusing as much on condoms, bicycles, and corrugated iron as it does on computers and nuclear power. In one startling example, Edgerton recounts how the German army relied on horses—not trains or trucks—as the basic means of transport during World War II. By the end of the war, the Wehrmacht had lost approximately 1.5 million horses in its attempt to conquer modern Europe. When I asked Edgerton for a one-word term to describe the persistence of old technologies in our daily lives, he deadpanned, “Normality.”

“The problem,” Edgerton explained to me, “is we think technology can only be new.” Outside of intelligence circles and Northern California, where the U-2 program employs more than 1,000 people, the continued use of these planes seems so unlikely, so archaic, that it’s difficult to square with the USAF’s reputation for lusting after the highest, fastest planes. In the 1960s, the USAF’s X-15 pilots set records for both that still stand. The USAF’s investment in cutting-edge flight and missile technology underwrote the U.S. aerospace industry for most of the Cold War. Since then, the Air Force has continued to lobby for extraordinarily expensive weapons systems, including the F-35, the most notorious military boondoggle of the twenty-first century. Even Edgerton, who wrote the book on technological longevity, declared the idea of the USAF flying U-2s to be “astonishing.”

Old technologies—“things,” in Edgerton’s parlance—simultaneously populate our world and escape our notice. The generation of aircraft built after World War II was built to last. Old planes are familiar, reliable, and trusted, but they require constant attention to keep in working order. The work of maintenance is essential, but invisible, the costs recorded as “depreciation” or “overhead.” Politicians and CEOs scramble to claim credit for their investments in R&D, but technicians, mechanics, and janitors keep the world running. By confusing the history of innovation with the history of technology, Edgerton argues, we not only miss this labor, but also we misunderstand the work of scientists and engineers. “The majority have always been mainly concerned with the operation and maintenance of things and processes; with the uses of things, not their invention or development,” he writes in the introduction to The Shock of the Old.