Gary Francis Powers Released on this Day in 1962
Gary Francis Powers was released in a prisoner exhange for convicted spy Rudolph Abel after spending 21 months in a Soviet prison. Powers had been shot down in May 1960 while flying his U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet airspace. As the U-2 flew at 70,000-foot altitudes, the Soviets could do nothing to knock these aircraft from the sky, until this incident. They launched 14 SA-2 missiles and MiG-19 jet inter...ceptors, and the percussion of the rockets detonating simultaneously damaged Powers' aircraft. He wrote that "the aircraft jerked forward, and a tremendous orange flash lit the cockpit and the sky." He managed to hit the self-destruct switch before bailing out, only to be captured by Soviet citizens near the Ural Mountains at the city of Sverdlovsk. The U-2 Incident was one of the most highly visible events of the Cold War. The museum has on display a piece of Powers' aircraft. It is the only fragment of the U-2 piloted by Powers on display in the United States. Click on the photos to learn more.
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