VIRTUAL - Cold War Museum - The Francis Gary Powers U-2 Shootdown

We think we know how Francis Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 on May 1, 1960. Many books and articles have been written on this since the event. What we did not know until recently was the additional information contained in the Soviet records of the investigation of the shootdown which were immediately classified and sent to the Soviet Military Archives. In 2002, they were retrieved and declassified. Since 2012, several new articles based on the recovered records have been written and published in Russia. Some of these were by officers who were involved in the event but were sworn to secrecy during the investigation that followed.\ \ John Schell has used translations based on those records in his research, which has resulted in a recent cover article in Air Power History (68:2, pp. 33-42, Summer 2021). Drawing from that article, “Secrets Revealed,” provides a more complete account of the shoot-down as it appears to have occurred.\ \ John begins his presentation with a Cold War overflight summary, including early U-2 overflights with sample images, a description of the SA-2 system operation, and the events leading to 1 May 1960. He follows with a timeline of the shootdown, which involved eight missiles from four sites bringing down a U-2 and a MiG-19 in about 30 minutes. His presentation concludes with a summary of the Soviet official investigation and provides a reason why the information was immediately classified and buried—hidden from public view for over 50 years.\ \ John Schell graduated in April 1970 with a BSEE and MSEE from Penn State and a reserve commission in the USAF. His first assignment took him to Wright-Patterson AFB Avionics Laboratory as a research engineer. He became the QRC project engineer for development and test of SA-2 Fan Song radar detection from RF-4’s for the Vietnam War. Afterward he was project engineer for development of a spotlight mode imaging radar testbed. His work resulted in a new design approach to achieve consistent image qu