I know that the USA had quite a few spy planes that flew over the USSR during the 50s and 60s to take pictures of military bases but I have never heard of planes from the USSR doing that to the USA. Did they ever do flyovers? Did the USSR do that to any NATO memebers or ever send spy planes close to the USA’s boarder to peer in?
Thanks
Ben
The concept of flyovers is that a country either can’t detect, or can’t physically stop, or can’t politically stop a country from intruding in its airspace.
The Russians tried for some time to shoot down a U-2 before they finally got one. They could detect the plane, but it flew too high. The SR-71 was a problem for other countries up until the day it was retired, because it was both too high, and too fast.
No other countries produced planes like the U-2 or the SR-71, so there was no way they could break into US airspace even if they had wanted to. We simply would have forced them back or shot them down.
Naturally, this pissed off the Russians and Chinese no end, and it’s certainly one of the reasons the Chinese attacked the U.S. observation plane a couple years ago. One of the major activities of the Soviet space program was to launch spy satellites, since they couldn’t overfly the U.S. / Canada by plane. Since a satellite can’t avoid overflying other countries, the spying country can always claim it’s doing something else besides looking at U.S. air fields. Like checking the wheat crop in the Ukraine. Otherwise the U.S. probably would have shot down the Russian satellites, too.
The Tupolev TU-95 Bear was used for over-flights for decades. NATO countries knew the Soviets were coming long before they got close and had interceptors scrambled and standing by to escort the Bear either safely away from sensitive areas or within certain flightlines (usually keeping them in international airspace). The Bear was a BIG turboprop airplane with extremely good range - but it was slow and easy to spot miles away so it could never sneak up on anyone. Most of the inflight photos on the linked site above look like they were taken by the NATO planes that were escorting the planes.
The U.S. used to do similar overflights in the late 1940’s - early 1950’s with B-29s and B-50s (originally known as a B-29D) flying along the Soviet border with occasional “accidental” incursions into Soviet airspace. Some aircraft were shot down. These losses helped spur the development of the U-2 and SR-71.
I beleive later on the recon version of the MiG-25 did overflights of countires in the middle east like Israel and Iran, and also possibly western Europe. But there was generally little need for this as travel in western countries is easy and Soviet intelligence had many agents in the countries and governments of the nations they normally wanted information on. Who needed a spy flight when they could subscribe to Aviation Leak?