Look what I found at Hickam AFB

John- They can fly up to 14 hours, so he may have been anywhere in the Pacific. 14 hours in a pressure suit does not sound like a lot of fun to me.

 

Call it a 'hunch', perhaps looking at things over Ukraine, maybe the Korean neighborhood. Who knows, it's all CLASSIFIED

Side Note -
I remember my dad(USAF) telling me there were times when fighter jocks from other squadrons would be out flying training and if they happen to be close to a base that had items they could not normally get in their home state, they'd radio in that they are having some kind of intermittent trouble with the throttle or avionics and land at the base. While the crew chiefs were checking out the plane, the pilots would go out and load up on whatever it is they needed and come back. Then, the chiefs would obviously report that everything checks out, the pilots would load up their goods and head home Everybody knew what was going on, but that's Air Force life.
Along the lines of this topic, who knows, maybe the U2 pilot was passed up on that schedule for a little R&R, so he made some at Hickam, or a genuine situation presented itself.

 

In the mid 90s I was stationed at Cherry Point- there used to be a Catalina parked at the end of one of the old runways near the base dump.

 

When I was working on F-22, there was always talk about the possibility of an engineer having to go to a base to help work out a problem with the aircraft. We wondered if anyone would ever be given a choice between Elmendorf and Hickam, and whether anyone would actually not pick the logical choice. Of course, it never happened.....