![]() Bad weather delayed the mission for two days, so Powers finally took off on May 1: A national holiday in the USSR. The program’s most experienced pilot – Francis Gary Powers, with 27 missions – was to take off from Peshawar, Pakistan, photograph missile sites in Baikonur and Plesetsk and a plutonium processing plant in Mayak and then land at Bodø, Norway. The CIA had grown overconfident after four years of successful missions. Eventually, improvements in Russian surface-to-air missile technology put U-2 overflights at risk. The aircraft was quite large and very thin – even a near missile miss could and did cause the wings to break off and the airframe to break up. By 1960, the U-2 program had photographed about 15 percent of the USSR and contributed to 5,500 intelligence reports. With its top-secret cameras and CIA-paid pilots, the U-2 program made dozens of flights over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, keeping track of bomber bases, missile launch sites and nuclear test sites. At that altitude, it was thought to be out of range of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles of the time. ![]() The U-2 could fly 70,000 feet high – more than 13 miles above the surface. ![]() Lockheed produced 104 U-2 planes through the end of the 1980s. The plane went into service in 1955 but most folks never heard about them until the U-2 incident in 1960. The Lockheed U-2 “Dragon Lady” was built for one specific purpose: To fly over top-secret targets at a very high altitude and photograph them for analysis.
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