NavList:

You wrote:
"But Maultsby got blinded by the Northern Lights and couldn't check his position"

That's what he claimed. :) This flight in October 1962 was near sunspot cycle minimum, which means low energy aurora. In addition there were no significant geomagnetic storms on the date of the flight, which also argues against bright auroral activity. Maultsby made a major navigation error and blamed that error on the northern lights. Northern lights could certainly have been a distraction. But blinded by them? No...

By the way, post-Cold War, this story has been re-told as "yet another scary incident that almost started WW3", and Maultsby's memoir exploited that. But we do also have Soviet archives and witnesses that were available for a period of time before Putin's stupidity locked Russia down again. According to some reports, Russian air defenses in the far eastern corner of Siberia treated this specific U2 intrusion as a non-threatening event. By contrast the U-2 flights over Cuba during that same week were denounced by Khrushchev as a threat because Cuban/Russian forces on the ground in Cuba could easily mistake the flights for a bomber preparing to nuke the missile sights there.

In your post you included some A.I. summaries. Please (everyone) when you include A.I. summaries, try to identify them specifically as such since A.I. summaries can be educational but they can also be quite wrong. Most importantly, it is important to specify which A.I. chatbot you are quoting. They are not all the same! Notice, too, that A.I. chatbots are not omniscient geniuses, and in the second screen capture from an A.I. engine in your post, the references (in little bubbles after some of the key points) are "Facebook" and "Reddit". So the chatbot is basing its summaries... on social media! This is just gossip and anecdote re-phrased with an authoritative "voice" by the A.I. That's their greatest threat to knowledge --they're highly skilled at bluffing.

You make one excellent, critical point. The U-2 has changed radically over the seventy years it has has been flying. The navigation and other avionics also have changed. It's a moving target (the characteristics of the aircraft and its systems). A U-2 flying in the past 20 years almost certainly has astro-aided inertial navigation (with autonomous star trackers) as well as GPS and other modern navigation technology. I would also expect that pilots are provided with detailed celestial navigation data for each flight so that they have some on-board backup, just in case. I doubt they use actual sextants, but certainly knowing basic info about bright stars could count as mission-critical even today.

The claim that there was "no room" in the U-2 suggests that there was no room for the well-known "R2-D2" robot celestial navigation system which was flying in the 1970s/80s aboard the SR-71 (needless to say, it did not get the mascot name, R2-D2, until 1977). That was an early, large system.

And the U-2 has been in the news... A hangar housing a U-2 was targeted in early March at Akrotiri on Cyprus --one of the "Sovereign Base Areas" governed by the UK within the territory of EU member Cyprus. The attack was apparently another low-cost, propeller-driven Shahed drone, likely launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah in support of Iran. It punched through the hangar but failed to explode. No reports suggest the U-2 was damaged, and it may not even be based there at this time. But they're still flying on high-altitude reconnaissance missions, even after seven decades...

Frank Reed