Pilot Charles Maultsby And The Cuban Missile Crisis

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On October 27, 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis , as reaching its boiling point, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Alaska going to a routine reconnaissance mission near the North Pole. Pilot Charles Maultsby was supposed to use celestial navigation to find his way, but halfway through the trip his view of the night sky became hopelessly obscured by the glow of the aurora borealis. With no visual markers to guide him, Maultsby soon drifted far off course and inadvertently crossed the border into the Soviet Union. He soon got shot down and sadly died

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