Lockheed U-2

Frank never apologized for that.

He insisted he had told them little more than they already knew, and the one thing they did not know or were not correct about was the altitude at which the U-2 was flying when it was shot down.

He never revealed that to the Soviets, and as far as we know, it remains classified.

It is small comfort to us, even less for his family, his wife Sue, his daughter Dee, his son Gary, to know that Francis Gary Powers died doing what he liked to do.

Boy, I know how tough that is to do.

Personal experience.

Now, we went back in time to prepare you for, and by the way, Francis Gary Powers, Frank Powers as they called him, he piloted the U-2.

Yeah.

The, okay, strange that this guy's got this part-time job as a guard, but his regular job is at, working for Lockheed.

But then you know that, um, the CIA actually had a highly t- a highly secret A-12 Oxcart project, um, that they were developing as the U-2 spy plane's successor, and this was, the plane was being developed at Lockheed in the Burbank site while this gentleman worked there.

Okay.

Okay, so let's go back to, real quick, the U-2.

Does anyone remember that [lips smack] Lee Harvey Oswald worked at, he was set at a Air Force base, and the base he was based out of was where the U-2 bomber was being secretly-

Yeah, that, like, secret-

Yes

... thing.

They would say that they would test the different aircrafts, vehicles, bombs.

That's what they test the U-2, right?

That's what it's called, the U-2? Yeah.

Which I think is the one in the picture.

The triangular spy plane? That's the one that goes stealth.

The scientists down there were reverse engineering that stuff to go ahead and make new stealth planes and combat vehicles and stuff like that.

And that's why it was so heavily guarded and so hush hush was because of all the stuff they were working on.

And Just to give a little bit more context before we move on, in 1955, there were two planes that were tested, two U-2 bomber planes.

awful.

Well, legendary U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers died in a helicopter crash in 1977.

Who? He was the guy that was shot down in May of 1960 flying a U-2 over the Soviet Union and he was captured.

And I think when he left the Air Force, he went on to be a helicopter pilot for a news TV station out in L.A. And he died in a helicopter crash in 1977.

What's

Kelly Johnson ran Skunk Works by a set of fourteen rules, and the most important of them was essentially this: keep the team small, keep the work secret, keep the bureaucracy out.

Skunk Works gave the world the P-80 Shooting Star, the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and eventually the Nighthawk.

By the time the stealth project began, Kelly Johnson had handed leadership of Skunk Works to Ben Rich, and under Rich's direction, the team developed what they called the faceted approach to stealth.

The computers of the era could not handle the complex equations required to calculate radar reflection from curved surfaces, but they could handle flat panels.

They were obviously running secret missions.

The whole point of NRO is reconnaissance, running, uh, you know, high altitude planes, spy planes, like the U2 was the first big one that we found out about or that we know of that was, uh, declassified, and then all the space-based, uh, satellites and, um, their own-- They actually have their own space program, basically, you know, cl-clandestine as far as reconnaissance goes and what exactly that is, we'll probably never know [chuckles] because that's the whole point of the NRO.

Uh, what does it say down at the bottom? It's essentially the nature of the NRO that we, we, that we, what we don't know likely dwarfs what we do.

Uh, so that was just something I found just using AI too, is what they, what, what is that? What is the NRO? All this stuff I, I think we all know, but, you know, and this is just a brief history of nineteen forty-seven, right after Roswell, the National Security Act goes up.

But the suit worked, the concept worked, and the suit itself, that rubberized contraption, is the direct ancestor of every pressure suit that followed.

The high altitude suits worn by U-2 pilots, the suits worn by astronauts, When Alan Shepard suited up for his Mercury capsule flight in 1961, the lineage of that suit ran straight back to Wiley Post and a rubber suit that looked like it belonged in a science fiction serial.

Aviation has a habit of doing that.

The stunt becomes the foundation.

Didn't they lodge a complaint with someone that we had come into the airspace already?

Well, I mean, back in the 1960s, the Americans have been flying U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union.

And the Soviets were saying, we know you're flying over us.

And the American government was all gaslighting.

no, no, no.

That says more about you than it says about us.

How could you say that about us after all we've been through? Until, of course, Gary Powers gets shot down in his U-2.

And the Soviets are like, we've got your guy.