Steven Spielberg’s most recent movie, Bridge of Spies, tells the story of a Cold War prisoner exchange between the Soviet Union and the US. The deal allowed US spy plane pilot Gary Powers to return home – but once there he faced a chorus of criticism.
Gary Powers had been in flight for four hours when his troubles began. His spy mission from an American airbase in Pakistan took him over central Russia, where, at more than 70,000 feet above the ground, he believed he was beyond the range of either fighter planes or missiles.
The 30-year-old CIA pilot, a veteran of the Korean war, expected to make his way, without incident, all the way across the Soviet Union to another base in Norway.
But when he was over the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, the unimaginable happened. His U-2 spy plane was hit by a Soviet missile barrage.
“I looked up, looked out, and just everything was orange, everywhere,” Powers recalled.
“I don’t know whether it was the reflection in the canopy [of the aircraft] itself or just the whole sky.
“And I can remember saying to myself, ‘By God, I’ve had it now.'”
Shockwaves hit the plane and the controls stopped responding. The blast snapped off a wing and Powers found himself hurtling down to earth in an uncontrollable spin.
What happened next is a tale Powers told to his son, Gary Junior, who was still a boy at the time.
“He thinks about ejecting – that’s the first thing pilots are trained to do – get out of a plane that’s been damaged or crippled,” says Powers’s son.
“But he realises that if he does eject he will sever his legs on the way out. The U-2 cockpit is very small, very tight, very compact. To eject you have to be in the perfect position to clear the airframe.”
Panicked, the pilot frantically tried to get himself into a position to eject safely. But after a moment’s pause Powers remembered there was an alternative escape route – he could simply open the canopy and climb out.
It was his best chance of coming out alive. But when he released the canopy, he was “immediately sucked up half-way out of the airplane”, says his son.
Powers told a 1962 Senate committee hearing that from his position part way out of the aircraft – which was spinning tail-first towards the ground – he had not been able to reach the self-destruct mechanism on the plane’s dashboard.
He was still attached to the cockpit by his oxygen pump but wrestled with it until it broke, leaving him free-falling until his parachute deployed a short time later.
Read the Remainder at BBC
Thank you! I remember that. I was in high school at the time; and it was all we talked about.
I was so innocent. At the time, I had no idea what guts that man had to have had.