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Korean Air Lines Flight 007

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Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Map showing the divergence of planned and actual flightpaths
Occurrence
DateSeptember 1, 1983
SummaryShoot down
SiteWest of Sakhalin island
Aircraft typeBoeing 747-230B
OperatorKorean Air Lines
RegistrationHL7442
Flight originNew York New York
 United States
Last stopoverAnchorage, Alaska
 United States
DestinationSeoul
 South Korea
Passengers240
Crew29
Fatalities269
Survivors0

Korean Air Lines Flight 007, also known as KAL 007 or KE007, was a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner shot down by Soviet jet interceptors on September 1, 1983 just west of Sakhalin island. KAL 007 carried 269 passengers and crew, including US congressman Lawrence McDonald. There were no survivors.

The Soviet Union stated it did not know the aircraft was civilian and suggested it had entered Soviet airspace as a deliberate provocation by the United States, during the Cold War, to test its military response capabilities, repeating the provocation of Korean Air Flight 902, shot down in Soviet airspace in 1978. The incident attracted a storm of protest from across the world, particularly from the United States.

Flight information

Korean Air Lines flight KAL 007 was a commercial Boeing 747-230B (registration: HL7442, formerly D-ABYH[1]) flying from New York City, United States to Seoul, South Korea. It took off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on August 31 carrying 240 passengers and 29 crew. After refueling at Anchorage International Airport in Anchorage, Alaska the aircraft departed for Seoul at 13:00 GMT (3:00 AM local time) on September 1. KAL 007 flew westward and then turned south on a course for Seoul-Kimpo International Airport that took it much farther west than planned, cutting across the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula and then over the Sea of Okhotsk towards Sakhalin, violating Soviet airspace more than once.

Interception

The Sukhoi Su-15 NATO codename Flagon was a Soviet interceptor.

Soviet air defense units had been tracking the aircraft for more than an hour while it entered and left Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula. The order to shoot down the airliner was given as it was about to leave Soviet airspace for the second time after flying over Sakhalin Island. It was probably downed in international airspace.[2] The lead aircraft of two Su-15 Flagon interceptors scrambled from Dolinsk-Sokol airbase fired two air to air missiles around 18:26 GMT,[3] and shot down KAL 007. The airliner crashed into the sea north of Moneron Island, killing all on board. Initial reports that the airliner had been forced to land on Sakhalin were soon proved false. Transcripts recovered from the airliner's cockpit voice recorder indicate that the crew were unaware that they were off course and violating Soviet airspace (at the end they were 500 kilometres to the west of the planned track). After the missile strike, the aircraft began to descend from 18:26 until the end of the recording at 18:27:46. At the time of the attack, the plane had been cruising at an altitude of about 35,000 feet. Capt. Chun was able to turn off the autopilot (18:26:46) and it is unknown whether he was able to regain control[4] as the aircraft spiraled toward the ocean until the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder stopped 1 minute later.

Investigations

The International Civil Aviation Organization investigated the incident. It concluded that the violation of Soviet airspace was accidental: the autopilot had been set to heading hold after departing Anchorage. It was determined that the crew did not notice this error or subsequently perform navigational checks that would have revealed that the aircraft was diverging further and further from its assigned route. This was later deemed to be caused by a "lack of situational awareness and flight deck coordination".[4]

According to the U.S. Department of State transcript of the shoot down reported by the New York Times,[5] the pilot who shot down Korean Air Flight 007 stated that he fired multiple bursts from his cannon prior to releasing the two missiles.[2] The pilot admitted there were no tracers, and these shots could not have been seen by the KAL 007 crew. The Soviets officially maintained that they had attempted radio contact with the airliner and that KAL 007 failed to reply. However, no other aircraft or ground monitors covering those emergency frequencies at the time reported hearing any such Soviet radio calls. The Soviet pilot reported that KAL 007 was flashing navigation lights, which should have suggested that the plane was civilian. In 1996, the Soviet pilot, Gennadie Osipovich, indicated that he knew KAL 007 was a Boeing: "I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use."[6]

Aftermath

US President Ronald Reagan condemned the shootdown on September 5, 1983, calling it the "Korean airline massacre," a "crime against humanity [that] must never be forgotten" and an "act of barbarism … [of] inhuman brutality."Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).

The next day, the Soviet Union admitted to shooting down KAL 007, stating the pilots did not know it was a civilian aircraft when it violated Soviet airspace. The attack pushed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to a new low. On September 15, President Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights into and out of the United States. As a result, Aeroflot flights to North America were only available through cities in Canada or Mexico. Aeroflot service to the United States was not restored until April 29, 1986.[7]

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, commissioned an audio-visual presentation in the Security Council using tapes of the Soviet radio conversations and a map of the plane's flight path to depict the shoot-down as savage and unjustified. Alvin A. Snyder, producer of the video, later revealed in a September 1, 1996 article in the Washington Post that he was given only selected portions of the tape of the Soviet military conversation that led to the downing of the aircraft. Unedited versions of the tape later revealed to Snyder that the Soviets had in fact given the plane internationally recognized warning signals.[8]

Airway R20 (Romeo 20), the flight path that Korean Air Flight 007 was supposed to fly, which came within 17 miles of Soviet airspace at its closest point, was closed after the accident on September 2. This reflected shock, and the need to reassure the public. However, pilots and airlines fiercely resisted and the route was reopened on October 2. More significantly, the US decided to utilize military radars, extending the radar coverage from Anchorage from 200 to 1200 miles. These radars had been used in 1968 to alert a DC-8 in a similar situation. R. V. Johnson writes in his 1986 Shootdown: "The question of why these radars were not used to alert 007 remains."[9]As a result of this incident, Ronald Reagan announced that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian uses once completed.[10]

It has been suggested that a covert, direct-action mission against ground targets of the U.S.S.R.'s peninsular defense network of Kamchatka-Oblast (presumably Voyska PVO and 173rd SMAAR installation sites) was launched by a U.S. military joint task force (compulsorily facilitated by the CIA) in response to the shooting down of KAL flight 007 by Russian fighter aircraft. Likely targets would have been either the Soviet radar sites used to track KAL 007, or the airbases from which the Soviet interceptors were scrambled. It is theorized that U.S. nuclear submarines were used to transport AH-6 attack helicopters which were contained in specially designed water-tight pods mounted on the external hulls of the submarines. After the submarines surfaced, the aircraft could be quickly assembled and deployed to the target area. Utilizing this inter-disciplinary tactical deployment scheme, this task force would have approached undetected by Soviet naval and air defense batteries, due to the ability of the submarines to deploy the aircraft within Soviet territorial waters, the helicopters' ability to fly at extremely low altitudes once airborn, and the sheer audacity of the operation itself. Needs verification

Similar incidents

Other civilian airliners have been shot down after straying off course near protected airspace.

  • April 20, 1978: Korean Air Flight 902 another Su-15 Soviet fighter fired on the 707 after it had flown over the Kola Peninsula. In this case, like the Libyan Airlines incident, contact was made between the fighter aircraft and the airliner. The pilots of Korean Air Flight 902 tried to escape but were instead hit by an air-to-air missile, killing two passengers and forcing the aircraft to crash-land on a frozen lake. An investigation into the cause of that incident was complicated by Soviet refusal to release the aircraft's flight data recorders.

Conspiracy theories

Main article: Korean Air Flight 007 conspiracy theories

The Korean Air Flight 007 incident has spawned a number of conspiracy theories, none of which has been confirmed by official sources. When the Russians finally produced the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder in the early 1990s, the actual cause of the disaster was known[citation needed].

  • Three television movies were produced about the incident; both films were produced before the fall of the Soviet Union allowed access to archives:
    • "Tailspain" The HBO Original Movie with Michael Morriarty and Soon-Tek Oh
    • Shootdown (1988), starring Angela Lansbury, John Cullum, and Kyle Secor, was based on the book of the same title by R.W. Johnson, about the efforts of Nan Moore (Lansbury), the mother of a passenger, to get answers from the US and Russian governments.
    • The British Granada Television documentary drama Coded Hostile (1989 - US title Tailspin) detailed the US military and governmental investigation, highlighting the likely confusion of Flight 007 with the USAF RC-135 in the context of routine US SIGINT/COMINT missions in the area. An updated version of Coded Hostile was screened in the UK in 1993, incorporating details of the 1992 UN investigation.
  • A documentary from Unsolved History, a program of Discovery Channel, featured this incident.
  • The song "Murder in the Skies" by Gary Moore on his album Victims of the Future (1983) retells the incident.

See also

References

  1. ^ Air Disaster.com entry
  2. ^ a b A Cold War Conundrum - Benjamin B. Fischerm, available online at: https://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/coldwar/source.htm
  3. ^ Maier, Timothy (2001-04-16), "Kal 007 Mystery - Korean Airlines flight 007 incident", Insight on the News {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (based on ground radar measurements supplied by the Soviets to the UN in 1993
  4. ^ a b http://www.icao.int/cgi/goto_m.pl?icao/en/trivia/kal_flight_007.htm Summary of the 1993 second ICAO report of KAL 007 shoot down. Cite error: The named reference "ICAO 2" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  5. ^ New York Times, September 12th, 1983, pg.1
  6. ^ New York Times interview, September 9, 1996
  7. ^ Timeline of US/Russian relations from http://moscow.usembassy.gov/links/history.php
  8. ^ "The Age of the New Persuaders" Military Review May-Jun 1997 from leav-www.army.mil Accessdate: 05/13/2007
  9. ^ Johnson, R. V. (1986). Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection. New York, N.Y: Viking. pp. 81–82, 277. ISBN 0-670-81209-9.
  10. ^ History of GPS from usinfo.state.gov

Other references

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