![]() Soon he saw another contrail, heading toward him, at supersonic speed. But as it was remarked at the time, “Anyplace is preferable to going down in the Soviet Union.”Ībout the time the sky below turned into a blanket of blue, he saw something in the distance: the contrail of a single-engine jet aircraft, headed in the opposite direction, at supersonic speed. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() and Keith Dunnavant in their book Spy Pilot, this was his signal to proceed as scheduled, in radio silence.ĭetermined 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. Seconds later, he heard a single click as confirmation. 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.
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