Summit Crisis.U-2 Incident , 1960

The U-2 Incident, also known as the Summit Crisis, was a significant event during the Cold War that happend in 1960. On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while conducting a reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory. The plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile and crashed near Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg)1.

Initially, the United States claimed that the aircraft was a weather research plane operated by NASA, but the Soviet Union produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, revealing the true nature of the mission. This incident led to a major diplomatic crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union, causing the collapse of a planned summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France.