Cold War Over the Mesa: A U-Two Makes an Unscheduled Landing
Near Cortez, Colorado
On the third of August, nineteen fifty nine, one of the most secret aircraft in the world landed at the small municipal airport in Cortez, Colorado. The plane was a Lockheed U-two reconnaissance aircraft, the high-altitude spy plane whose pilots, including some from the Republic of China Air Force, trained in the United States during the Cold War. The pilot was Major Hsi-Chun Hua, known to his American colleagues as Mike.
At seventy thousand feet over the Colorado Plateau, the aircraft's engine flamed out. Major Hua was suddenly in a powerless glide over the rugged canyon country of the American Southwest, with no engine and no chart that showed him where a paved runway might be found. He navigated by sight through the mountain valleys, scanning the high desert below for anything that could serve as a landing strip.
He spotted the lights of Cortez Municipal Airport, a small field that did not appear on his classified navigation materials, made his approach, and got the aircraft down on the runway in one piece. The sudden appearance of a U-two, a plane whose existence was officially secret, at the airport of a farming community in southwest Colorado was a moment of Cold War strangeness that locals did not soon forget. Major Hua's skill in bringing the aircraft safely to ground under those conditions made the landing legendary among reconnaissance pilots of the era.
