I would like to kow if there is any disagreement on the U-2 incident wherein Francis Gary Powers walked away from the plane, and the plane was recovered after being shot down. An Air Force pilot that I knew shortly after that said that the public description was a cover-up, and could not have happened as described.
I read an essay by Robert Heinlein in which he pointed out that if you shoot down a U-2 flying at cruising altitude and speed, you end up with airplane parts spread over several counties. The pilot certainly doesn’t walk away from it. Chances are that the pilot had some sort of engine failure that required a landing.
Heinlein was talking out of his ass with regard to this particular issue. (The essay can be found in Expanded Universe, BTW.) His claims (that Soviet rockets couldn’t reach U2’s cruising altitude) and that the U2 would come apart if struck were both spurious and based upon speculation of flight parameters that were classified at the time.
The short summary of the incident: the CIA was conducting overflights of the Soviet Union based out of Turkey using the U2 reconnaissance plane, which was essentially a sailplane with jet engines. Because of the large control and lift surfaces the U2 could operate at higher altitudes than most planes could fly (70k+ feet); while the Mig-25 could reach this altitude it did so on a ballistic track, unable to maintain flight control. The U2 (and the later TR1) flew quite slowly and liesurely, in contrast to the later high speed SR-71.
Power’s plane was shot down or encountered mechanical failure; the consensus is unclear. The Soviets claimed to have struck it with the first rocket volley, which would be an astonishingly lucky shot at best, and the U2s, each one handbuilt and with somewhat differeing flight characteristics were all rather tempermental. Powers, in his autobiography of the incident, Operation Overflight, claims not to know what happened; that one minute he was flying along, the next he became conscious already having ejected from the craft.
There is some controversy about this claim, as pictures of the reckage, released by the Soviets to prove that they’d shot the plane down, seem to indicate that the engines had been throttled back and control surfaces manipulated to counter a rapid descent. Powers claimed not to have manipulated the controls and that he didn’t have warning to detonate the explosive charges on the film cannister. There were not, BTW, charges that would destroy the entire plane, as are often claimed; this would have been weight prohibitive in a craft that was extremely weight sensitive.
At any rate, the Soviets recovered the film cannister, the contents of which presumably allowed them to estimate the cruising altitute and speed, and descern what targets the Americans were interested in. Powers was held in a Soviet prison, charged and convicted with spying, and eventually traded back to the US in a swap of for a Russian spy. Once he returned the shadow of his failure to destory the film cartridge and speculations that the “shootdown” might have been due to pilot error (the flights were long and grueling and operators had to be very alert to the flight environment and fuel status), and ended his Air Force career in semi-disgrace.
I no longer have the book, but Powers also suggests, subtly, that is wife, with whom he was having marital problems (i.e. she was an unfaithful drunk) knew when he was making this flight and could have communicated this information to one or more sources who were later known to sell information to the Russians.
Powers died in a helicopter accident in 1975 (I think) when he ran out of fuel, which is ironic considering how much care was taken during U2 flights to track fuel status. The U2 and derivatives continues to be used even to this day, which is pretty phenomenal for an aircraft that was designed and built within 9 months and had an anticipated operational lifespan of less than 2 years. (Most of the original fleet, aside from those destroyed in training accidents, flew for well over a decade before being dismantled or cannibalized.)
Stranger
What source says FGP walked away from the crash? Every source I’ve read says that he bailed out as the plane was breaking up.
this doesn’t directly answer the question, but there are interesting declassified documents on the U-2 here: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB74/#docs
Power’s U-2 experienced a flameout of its single jet engine. To restart it, he had to descend to about 30,000 feet-and that is where the Russian missile got him. At least one, and possibly two of the MIG intercepter fighters were hit and destroyed by Soviet SAMs aimed at Powers U-2. The Russians never said if these pilots survived-I suspect they did not.
The really funny thing about this incident: both Kruschev and Eisenhower knew all about these flights; yet they both pretended ignorance about them. Kruschev played his hand well-he had Ike first denying the U2, and then admitting the spy flights! Which embarrassed the Norwegian government to no end-the U2 flights started in Peshawar, Pakistan, and ended in Bodo, Norway.
Actually, the Russians were careful NOT to mistreat Powers-he was pretty well cared for (his wife got conjugal visits), because they wanted to trade him for Rudof Abel(the spy).
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but were the Soviets ever able to perform flights like that over our territory?
They did not. Sergei Kruschchev wrote an article about the incident from the Soviet side (he was an advisor to his father) in the September 2000 issue of American Heritage, BTW, a good indication of the Soviet view of the incident.
That is what I remember from reading articles, and talking to some people who were in a position to know in the years afterward-whether they did or not I don’t know, except that I remember that it is speculated that the flame-out was caused by the SA-2 missile detonating almost within range. Additional missile fire damaged the plane to the point that the pilot ejected. The critisim was that the pilot should have activated the self-destruct charges before ejecting. Powers said he couldn’t remember the details of that critical time. Others said he skipped that step because he didn’t want the plane blowing up while he was ejecting. While the charges may not have been large enough to completely destroy the plane, if you were the CIA pilot at the time how much faith would you have it that promise?
Not that I have ever read, if you define “our territory” as the continental US. This seems to me it would have been technologically impossible. To do flights like this would require that the plane take off somewhere the Russians would be allowed to (or the Soviet Union), fly over the US mainland, and then land somewhere that wasn’t hostile. The only starting/end points I can imagine would be the far Eastern Soviet Union by Alaska, and Cuba. Assuming a Russian plane could traverse the distance, how could it take off or land in Cuba without being shot down?
It was suspected that some aeroflot airliners were modified for such missions, as well Bear Bombers were also doing Elint and Signint missions , in the course of the training flights that skirted the North American Coast, on the way to cuba.
Declan
Regarding aeroflot: Aeroflot began flying the Gander-Havana route in the early 1960’s…and there were damn few passengers on that run! The Russian airliners would occasionally “stray” over Otis AFB (Cape Cod), and the new London CT subamrine base. The airforce would scramble fighters out of Otis and Rome NY, and "escort’ the Aeroflot flight out of American airspace. i don’t know if the Russians got anything valuable, but i do know that they had very good, very sophisticated cameras-these were built for them by Carl Zeiss (of Jena, East germany), and were said to be as good as the Itek cameras carried by the U2s.
Sounds like a precursor to the KAL 007 incident. At least we didn’t shoot down their airliner.
An interesting photo floating around (IIRC it was published in Life or TIME in 1966) shows four Taiwanese U-2s that had been shot down over China on display there, largely intact. I imagine the old U-2s must have had a tendency to autorotate/spin from whatever altitude they depart controlled flight (from an explosion, or other missile damage), resulting in a relatively slow and stable fall from altitude. That might explain localized and largely complete wreckages.
U2 documents from the Federation of American Scientists. Technical information about the U2 from the same site.
Why do that when they could have easlily launched spy planes from civilian airports in the US? 
They were at least at smart back then as drug runners are today. :rolleyes: We are and have been an “open” society, as oppossed to the USSR which did not allow ANY civilian flights without proper flight plans or papers.