History Brief: the U-2 Incident
Video from the channel Reading Through History about Lockheed U-2, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 3:11. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.
Short explainer piece on the 1960 U-2 incident. It explains that in the late 1950s relations between Eisenhower and Khrushchev seemed to be improving, and that in the mid-1950s the United States commissioned Lockheed to build a spy plane capable of photographing Soviet bases from high altitude.
According to the video, the U-2 could fly at around fourteen miles of altitude and stay airborne for up to eleven hours, and its pilots wore pressurized suits. Those flights revealed that Soviet military power was smaller than it appeared.
In 1960 a Soviet missile shot down Gary Powers's U-2, who parachuted out and was captured. The incident exposed the espionage and seriously damaged relations between the two powers.