Taiwanese Airforce and Cortez Miracle - U-2 Missions

When I was at 10-15 years old, some of my friends' fathers served in Taiwanese airforce base in Hsin-Chu, which is about about 30 miles south of another airforce base at TaoYuan. I was told by my little friends that there were reconnaissance flights to China and some were shut down and those pilots never came back. One of my best friends father was one of them. I was about 10 years old, and he was only one year older. He never said a word about his father, nor about the mission stories. I never had courage to ask him about those things either. It seemed no one knew those were actual U-2 flight missions.

I was also told by others that the mission team was called "Western Company". But, I always had doubts about the truthfullness of those stories because I didn't think Taiwan had such kind of airplane to carry out those long distance flights. I never heard any other things related to those missions until today, when I saw this news:

http://news.chinatimes.com/2007Cti/2007Cti-News/2007Cti-News-Content/0,4521,50202807+132010020600659,00.html


50年X檔案解密 美不明飛行物 竟與我國有關

This is his personal description of this accident, in English:

http://www.hmhfp.info/SG_09E.html

After digging it with Google, I found some very interesting historical records, which also highlights Taiwnese' air force's sacrifices and contributions during the cold war era. This slide presentation told so many heart breaking as well as heroic stories about those events.

U-2 Landing at Cortez (August 3, 1959)

http://www.cortezeaa1451.org/CortezU2.htm


You can see how difficult it was to land U-2 from the short video I found on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamnTyfkUBY