History, Explained: How Russia Shot Down a U-2 Spy Plane

Dario Leone

Security,

Losing a U-2 over the Soviet Union was the nightmare scenario, and Francis Gary Powers was not dreaming.

“My God,” he said to himself. “I’ve had it now.”

It was around 6:20 on Sunday May 1, 1960 when a member of the crew pulled the ladder away and slammed the canopy shut. The pilot then locked it from the inside. As Francis Gary Powers taxied on to the runway out of Peshawar air base, Pakistan and carefully guided the U-2C, model 360, into the air, the J75/P13 engine roared with a distinctive whine. He never lost the thrill of hearing the familiar sound.

Quickly climbing toward his assigned altitude and switching into autopilot for his twenty-eighth reconnaissance mission, he headed toward Afghanistan and initiated a single click on the radio. Seconds later, he heard a single click as confirmation. As explained by Francis Gary Powers Jr. and Keith Dunnavant in their book Spy Pilot, this was his signal to proceed as scheduled, in radio silence.

Determined to pack as much surveillance as possible into one flight, Powers was scheduled to cross over the Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas and into the southern USSR, passing over a 2,900-mile swath of Soviet territory, from Dushambe and the Aral Sea, to the rocket center of Tyuratam, and on to Sverdlovsk, where he would head northwest, reaching the key target of Plesetsk facility to judge the Soviet ICBM progress before turning even farther northwest, toward the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. Exiting to the north, he was to land in Bodo, Norway, where a recovery team was waiting to transport the U-2 and secure the pilot. In the case of an emergency, such as running low on fuel, he was authorized to take a shortcut into the neutral nations of Sweden or Finland, which would be sure to cause complications for Washington. But as it was remarked at the time, “Anyplace is preferable to going down in the Soviet Union.”