FICTION BECOMES REALITY: When Francis Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 spy plane in 1960, the US claimed that the plane was a weather research aircraft. On 27 Jan 2000, an ER-2 (the NASA weather research version of the U-2) flew over Russia from St Petersburg to Moscow with Russian permission. The plane was sampling the ozone layer to help understand the recent loss of stratospheric ozone. --Stephen V Cole