Chinese Museum Taunts U.S. Air Force U-2 Pilot—We Shot Down U-2s Before, We Can Do It Again

A museum in Beijing has invited the pilot of a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane to visit its exhibit on U-2s that the Chinese military shot down more than 40 years ago.

“Anyone familiar with military history knows that our People’s Liberation Army Air Force has shot down U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft many times in history,” the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution stated on Weibo on Aug. 25.

The taunt came as Chinese warships gathered in the western Pacific Ocean, and American intelligence aircraft sortied to keep tabs on them.

The Chinese navy in August staged an unprecedented four simultaneous naval war games in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea and South China Sea—a mobilization that many experts viewed as a veiled threat toward Taiwan and China’s South China Sea neighbors.

In response, Taiwan reinforced its outlying islands and the Pentagon staged intelligence-gathering systems. As part of that effort, a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane, apparently flying from Osan air base in South Korea, flew in international air space over one of the war games—presumably the one in the nearby Yellow Sea.

Beijing lodged a protest with Washington, accusing the U-2 overflight of “seriously interfering in normal exercise activities.” Surveillance flights over the war games of rival countries are legal and routine.

But yes, the Chinese military has shot down U-2s before and it could in theory do it again—although not without profound consequences.

It’s worth pointing out that the 11 U-2s Beijing’s forces have claimed over the decades all were Taiwanese. And they were flying over China, not the ocean, when S-75 surface-to-air missiles—SA-2s, in NATO parlance—swatted them out of the sky.

As part of a proxy spying effort targeting the Communist Bloc, the United States starting in the late 1950s equipped the Taiwanese military with high-altitude spy planes including RB-57s and U-2s.

On Oct. 7, 1959, a salvo of three missiles from an S-75 battery destroyed a Taiwanese RB-57 flying over China at an altitude of 65,600 feet. It was the first-ever hostile shoot-down of an aircraft by a surface-to-air missile.

Starting in 1962, Taiwanese U-2s flew missions at altitudes as high as 75,000 feet over eastern China’s main industrial and population centers. CIA-operated U.S. Air Force U-2s didn’t totally avoid China. Taking off from India and Pakistan, American U-2s periodically probed nuclear test sites in sparsely-populated western China.

But the Taiwanese U-2s were in the thick of it. They flew in broad daylight within full view of Chinese interceptors. Han Decai, a Chinese air force MiG-17 pilot, described his frustration to CIA historian Bob Bergin. “We did our best to attack them, but the problem was the extreme altitude at which the U-2 flew,” Han said. “We could not reach them.”

But the S-75 could reach them. Chinese S-75 crews shot down their first Taiwanese U-2 on Sept. 9, 1962. By the time the Taiwanese U-2 program folded in 1974 amid a wider rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, the island’s air force had lost no fewer than 11 U-2s and, usually, their pilots. Chinese S-75s accounted for most of the kills.

The remains of one of those U-2s is on display at the Beijing museum. “The broken body and the gloomy cabin make visitors never guess that [the U-2] had done whatever it wanted at an altitude of more than 20,000 meters, unscrupulous and arrogant,” the museum stated.

Today, the Chinese air force still doesn’t operate a fighter with altitude-performance adequate to intercept a U-2. But the Chinese navy’s most powerful ship-launched surface-to-air missile, the HQ-9, easily can reach a U-2—even at the plane’s maximum altitude.

Which is not to say Beijing would shoot down a U-2 flying in international air space. To do so would risk triggering a war.