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 On this day in engineering history, the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane near Sverdlovsk, a city some 1300 miles inside the borders of Russia. The single-engine, single-pilot, high-altitude aircraft was flown by Francis Gary Powers, a United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pilot whose capture ultimately led to the cancellation of an East-West summit and the revelation of a top-secret overflight program. In this historic Cold War clash, America's Lockheed-built U-2 was downed by a V-75 (SA-2) Guideline, a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) system that was designed for the defense of both fixed targets and field forces.
On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers departed Peshawar, Pakistan aboard Article 360, a U-2C spy plane that had once run out of fuel and crash-landed in Japan. The purpose of Mission 4154, Operation Grand Slam, was to photograph Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) sites near Sverdlovsk before landing at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) airbase in Norway. Although Powers had flown on several of the U-2's 23 previous Soviet overflight missions, the pilot later admitted that he had "not flown high enough" on May Day, 1960. When Soviet jet fighters were unable to intercept Powers' U-2 at 65,000 ft., a ground-based SA-2 Guideline battery launched 14 high-altitude missiles. His aircraft badly damaged, Powers parachuted to safety. He was captured, tried and sentenced to hard labor before his release in a "spy swap" 1962.
The U-2 that Powers flew was designed by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, an aeronautical engineer at Lockheed's Skunk Works in Burbank, California. Polaroid developed the optics for the spy plane's large-format cameras, which provided a resolution of 2.5 ft. from an altitude of 60,000 ft. The U-2's glider-like profile combined high aspect-ratio wings with the fuselage of the F-104 Starfighter, a supersonic interceptor that Johnson had created to replace the F-86 Sabre. With a minimum airframe weight, the U-2 allowed little margin for error. For 90% of a typical mission, a pilot flew within only five knots of a stall, an event which would cause an dangerous decrease in altitude. To maintain its operational ceiling of 70,000 ft., however, the U-2 had to fly at only 10 knots less than its maximum speed.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Gary_Powers
http://www.spyflight.co.uk/u2.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/u-2-spy-plane-incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/airdef/v-75.htm
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Re: May 1, 1960 – The U-2 Spy Plane Incident
