The Full Story of the Two Parachutes Spotted After Gary Powers’ U-2 Shoot-Down over Soviet Union | Aviation

The Infamous U-2 was not the only aircraft shot out of the Soviet skies that day in May 1960, there was a second parachute floating to earth other than that of Francis Gary Powers.

It was May 1, 1960, and Francis Gary Powers found himself on the ground in a foreign land, surrounded by its inhabitants. Powers had just had his Lockheed U-2 Spy plane suffer structural failure from a near miss of a Soviet SAM (surface-to-air missile) and the aircraft broke apart. Because of the force of the explosion and how it had thrown him forward in the cockpit, he had to manually climb out of the spinning cockpit, not able to use the ejection system, somehow sever his oxygen hose, and escape being hit by any debris.  His parachute opened at around 15,000 feet, and he had floated down near a Russian village.

Since the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) recruited Powers to fly and had failed to teach their U-2 pilots the native language of the countries being overflown, Powers could not understand those around him, nor could they understand him. One of the men, realizing the language barrier, pointed at Powers and then held up two fingers and pointed to the sky. Powers looked up, and noticed a red and white parachute at a very high altitude some distance away. Knowing his…