It may not sound possible to "catch" an American spy plane while driving a Dodge Charger. But that's precisely what we did on a sweltering August afternoon at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.

In a U.S. Air Force safety maneuver that hardly felt like one, our car raced onto the military runway just as a U-2 spy plane approached for a landing.

The plane itself was designed in the 1950s to grip the lightest parts of the atmosphere some 70,000 feet above the Earth, so, in the words of one of the U-2 pilots, "it really doesn't want to stop flying."