"Vince" wrote in message
...
Tankfixer wrote:
In article ,
mumbled
TMOliver wrote:
"Vince" wrote ...
Spies get shot at all the time
Doesn't make it a "battlefield"
they were CIA flights
I guess they forgot to tell you that those VFP-62 pilots were in Navy
flight suits flying USNavy a/c - big bright stars and all - out of NAS
Key West, JAX or off CVA decks.
TMO
the U-2 flights were cia
Yes, but did they take the photo's of the SA-2 sites from under 500 feet
and in excess of 700 mph ?
No, they didn't
that is correct, but not the point of the discussion
the Military is much better equipped and focused on battlefield
reconnaissance than the CIA
The U-2 was overwhelmingly a CIA project at that time.
Part of the reason was that CIA missions violated the domestic or
municipal law of the countries we were overflying. A U-2 pilot on an
overflight was a spy and could be shot quite legally. No one could be
"ordered" on such a mission.
The low level flights were different. They were clearly belligerent acts
by the US armed forces. As an act of war, anyone shot down was a POW.
Vince
The argument could be made that if you fly as high as a U-2, especially back
in the early days, were you really in national airspace anyway? According to
the FAI (Int'l Aeronautical Federation) near-space starts at 75,000 feet,
and according to Wiki the U-2R has a service ceiling of 90,000 feet.
To the best of my knowledge there isn't even any accepted altitude below
which one is in territorial airspace. Clearly there sort of must be such an
altitude, because nobody reasonably suggests that a satellite at 250 km is
violating anything. Also, you can't necessarily say that airspace goes up to
the level that balloons can reach or suborbital craft can reach or airfoils
can maintain lift, because the definition of the maximum limits of a
territorial sea is 12 miles, which in this day and age is highly artificial
also.
AHS