When Kennedy learned that the year-old Anderson had a wife and two sons, 5 and 3 years old, it struck home. President Kennedy and members of the press at the signing of the Cuba Quarantine, October 23, Memorial, which was originally installed in Thirteen engraved granite slabs embedded in the lawn describe each day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and surrounding an F Sabre Jet, similar to one flown by Anderson, are text panels describing his boyhood, his distinguished military career and his lasting legacy of contributing to the peaceful resolution of the crisis.
Instead, his death was a jolt to Kennedy and Khrushchev and pushed the crisis to a point where they had to take one of two paths, both of which had clear consequences. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. Then you go into a reactive mode and loosen up. Surveillance crews were jammed into cramped compartments, where they huddled over radar screens and electronic monitoring devices. They were told that if they were shot down, they were on their own. Because the ferret missions were top secret, the families knew nothing about the nature of the flights—or what happened when they went wrong.
Finally, in , documents about the flights were declassified. A joint U. But airmen are still unaccounted for. Their families are still waiting to find out what happened to them. Jack Fette was the pilot of a Navy PB4Y-2 Privateer, a maritime patrol bomber converted to a ferret aircraft; his was based in Morocco.
On April 8, , just before Jack was due to go on leave, another Privateer pilot got sick. Jack volunteered to fly in his place. That night, he and the crew were shot down over the Baltic Sea.
Charlotte Busch Mitnik has been waiting for her brother Sam since In June , Mitnik was 18 and had just graduated from high school. Her brother Sam was the pilot of an RB, converted from the famous four-engine Superfortress, stationed in Japan.
I knew something tragic had happened to my brother. Mitnik recalls her father frequently writing to senators asking for help, but nothing came of it.
And that was the end of the story—for 40 years. A few days later, in a speech to a joint meeting of Congress, Yeltsin said that if any Americans were still in the former Soviet Union, they would be found and returned to their families.
A few months earlier, Yeltsin and President George H. Bush had formed the U. Although the trip was not productive, the previously chilly relations seemed to thaw. So it was about as hopeful a period as I can recall. Toon represented the Americans. General Dimitrii Volkogonov represented the Russians. The U. Connell, who speaks with a quiet intensity, faced a daunting task.
He and his team criss-crossed Russia and the former Soviet republics digging into archives. There is Podolsk, which is the central archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense and has everything but the Navy [missions]. There is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives.
Then you have the Archives of the Russian Federation. Connell and his team interviewed hundreds of witnesses: guards, retired officers, former prison camp inmates, even the pilots who shot down some of the airplanes. In , the commission interviewed Anatoly Gerasimov, one of the Russian pilots who intercepted the Privateer. He claimed the aircraft exploded mid-air before crashing into the sea.
By now, witnesses have aged, adding urgency to the mission. The files provided Boylan with detailed information about what the U. Naval Academy ring engraved with the name John Robertson Dunham, class of He was buried at Arlington in August , and a month later, the RB families gathered there to dedicate a stone memorializing the crew.
We heard about it when we went to one of the meetings. That cycle would repeat. Radar contact was lost three hours later, and the aircraft failed to return to base.
During a rescue flight, an empty life raft was spotted about miles off the Soviet coast, although no aircraft wreckage was found, and no survivors were sighted. B was shot down 18 miles from the shore.
In the s they were substantially updated again; that upgrading process continues to this day. The U-2 has so far seen off at least five possible replacements. The first, in the s, was from the first-generation UAVs unmanned aerial vehicles. The whale-like Northrup Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude remotely piloted surveillance aircraft, is one of the most recent.
When it first appeared in the U-2 was more than 40 years old. With the Global Hawk sidelined, the evolution of the U-2 can take its next step. The changes to the plane will include better avionics, a touchscreen cockpit that you can use with a pressure suit and a new mission computer that will allow the plane to run the new Open Mission System OMS.
A bit like a spyplane equivalent of the Android system you might find on your mobile phone, OMS will enable aircraft like the U-2 to talk easily to the computer systems of tanks, ships, aircraft, satellites and even cyberweapons.
The U-2's design - a slim body and long wings - help keep it aloft in the thin air of the upper atmosphere Credit: Lockheed Martin. The U-2 helped to pioneer the use of a data link to relay intelligence to ground stations which might be thousands of miles away, bouncing the signal first to a satellite above it.
New sensors or cameras are to be added and removed from the plane quicker and cheaply than ever before and compared to it its rivals. And that means it cannot fly over the airspace of other countries without their knowledge.
A U-2 was recently spotted by Chinese military flying over their military exercises in South China Sea. It now appears that US defence contractor Northrup Grumman has now built a small fleet of top-secret drones that look like its B-2 bomber to do precisely this. Some believe it could replace the U The Boeing XB spaceplane could one day launch tiny satellites which could perform some of the U-2's missions Credit: Nasa.
While a cloaking device is a fictional piece of stealth technology that allows planes or spacecraft to become invisible, the top-secret drone is known for its unusual light colour that makes it hard to spot.
Micro-satellites pose a greater threat to the future of the U
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