Col. Danielle Barnes, a senior officer who oversees base operations, said military personnel recovering the two pilots found that both their parachutes had deployed. She said she could not discuss what went caused the plane to crash or Eadie’s death. There’s no timeline for investigators to conclude their probe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They will take as long as they need to execute a thorough and detailed investigation,” Barnes said.
The Air Force said the plane was conducting a training mission on a routine flight path before something went wrong and the high-flying aircraft slammed into a mountainous area about 20 miles west of the runway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photos from the scene showed sections of the tail and wing splayed on the mountainside, with much of the aircraft charred and disintegrated. The crash sparked a fire on the grassy terrain, which was quickly extinguished. The wreckage of a TU-2S is strewn across the foothills south of the Sutter Buttes mountain range in Northern California. The training aircraft crashed after taking off from Beale Air Force Base on Sept. 20, 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Hector Amezcua\/The Sacramento Bee via AP<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The U-2 “Dragon Lady” is a surveillance and reconnaissance plane capable of flying above 70,000 feet (21,336 meters), an extremely high altitude that’s twice as high as a typical commercial airliner flies. Developed during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union, the single-engine aircraft now carries high-resolution cameras and sensors to gather radio signals and other information useful to intelligence agencies and battlefield commanders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pilots wear pressurized suits like those used by astronauts to survive in the low-pressure, low-oxygen environment in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Col. Larry Broadwell, commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and Beale Air Force Base, Calif., pauses while talking to reporters about the crash of a U-2 aircraft Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Rich Pedroncelli\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the crash, the Air Force said it had 33 U-2s. Most are a single-seat aircraft, but five \u2014 including the one that crashed Tuesday \u2014were a two-seat version used for training pilots to fly the specialized plane. Built by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp, the U-2 fleet is based at Beale, with some planes flying missions from air bases around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There have been a handful of crashes since the U-2 began flying in the 1950s. The Soviet Union shot down a U-2 and captured pilot Frances Gary Powers in 1960. Powers was imprisoned for two years before being released in a prisoner exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U-2 is slated for retirement in 2019 as the military relies increasingly on unmanned aircraft such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk for intelligence gathering, though senior U.S. lawmakers from California are pressuring the Air Force to delay the retirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/u-2-crash-wreckage.jpg.jpg\")
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