Video: 'Yesterday's Air Force: The U-2 and Gary Powers Incident'

(Sunday, May 1, 1960, 8:53 a.m. Moscow Standard Time; during the 1960 U-2 incident, part of the Cold War) — A United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces today while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance at 70,500 feet deep into Soviet territory.

The single-seat aircraft, flown by pilot Francis Gary Powers, was hit by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile and crashed near Sverdlovsk (today’s Yekaterinburg).

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Powers parachuted and chose not to commit suicide, and landed near Sverdlovsk, where he was captured alive.

Initially, U.S. authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission’s true purpose when a few days later the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2’s surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases taken during the mission.

Video: '1960: Be A Man- Sell Out (1970 documentary narrated by Peter Jennings)' (1960 U-2 incident at 5:40)

The incident occurred during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, around two weeks before the scheduled opening of an east–west summit in Paris. It caused great embarrassment to the United States and prompted a marked deterioration in its relations with the Soviet Union, already strained by the ongoing Cold War.