![]() ![]() ![]() The first test flight was on August 1, 1955. Lockheed engineers worked in secret, by hand, during off hours to design the craft and fabricate its parts. It’s hard to believe the U-2 is still in operation decades after President Eisenhower first ordered the manufacture of a plane that could fly at 70,000 feet-beyond the reach of Soviet fighters and radar. Since that day, the U-2 has served as an icon of Cold War tensions, inspiring a famous rock band’s name and, most recently, a Stephen Spielberg movie about negotiating Francis Gary Powers’ release. Khrushchev revealed the truth: the U-2 was a CIA plane designed specifically to fly at super-high altitudes for global surveillance. The American cover story was that the U-2 was a NASA aircraft used for weather observations (US officials even hastily painted a U-2 in NASA colors and trotted it out for the media). President Dwight Eisenhower had previously denied the U-2 had been spying, or that it was even a spy plane. The U-2 became famous on May 7, 1960, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that a Soviet Surface-to-Air Missile had shot one down, and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been captured. ![]() The most pointed detail of China’s claim was the reference to the U-2, a 65-year-old aircraft with a fabled Cold War history. A few weeks ago, Chinese authorities charged that a US U-2 spy plane had violated Chinese air space during a People’s Liberation Army training exercise. ![]()
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