Korean Air Lines Flight 007

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed Gate 15 of John F. Kennedy International Airport on the night of the 31st of August 1983, bound for Seoul. It never arrived. Somewhere over the dark waters northwest of Japan, a Soviet interceptor fired two missiles at the Boeing 747, and 269 people died. What followed was not just a tragedy but a slow-moving crisis that exposed the paranoia of the Cold War, the bureaucratic failures that let a civilian airliner drift hundreds of miles off course, and a cover-up that took nearly a decade to unravel. Why did the plane go so far off its planned route without anyone noticing? Why did Soviet pilots fire on an aircraft one of them recognized as a commercial Boeing? And why did it take until 1992 for the flight recorders to reach the investigators who needed them most?

• 2. The Plane and Its People

  ›

  The aircraft was a Boeing 747-230B with serial number 20559, the 186th of that type ever built. It had originally been delivered to Condor in 1972 as D-ABYH and was sold to Korean Air Lines in 1979, re-registered HL7442. At the time of the incident it was 11.5 years old. Four Pratt and Whitney JT9D-7A engines powered it. At the controls for the Anchorage-to-Seoul leg were Captain Chun Byung-in, 45 years old, with more than ten thousand total flight hours; First Officer Son Dong-hui, 47, with nearly nine thousand; and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong, 31. Among the 246 passengers were 22 children under 12. One hundred thirty of those on board had planned to connect onward to destinations including Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taipei. One of the most prominent passengers was Larry McDonald, a United States representative from Georgia who also served at the time as the second president of the John Birch Society. The Soviets would later claim, citing the New York Post and the Soviet news agency TASS, that former president Richard Nixon had originally been booked in the seat next to McDonald; a former Nixon aide said Nixon had been offered the seat but declined it on his own.

• 3. How a Plane Goes Off Course

  ›

  Fewer than thirty seconds after lifting off from Anchorage, KAL 007 was directed by air traffic control to turn to a magnetic heading of 220 degrees. That sharp left turn was only meant to bring the plane onto route J501 toward Bethel, Alaska, 346 nautical miles to the west, where it would then begin using its inertial navigation system to track the NOPAC route R20 across the Pacific. The INS mode of the 747-200 autopilot had a specific limitation: if the aircraft was more than 7.5 nautical miles from its programmed course line when the pilot switched to INS mode, the computer would hold the previous heading and wait in an "armed" condition until the plane moved close enough to its route to "capture" the course automatically. The Anchorage VOR beacon was out of service that night for maintenance; the crew had been informed by a Notice to Airmen. Civilian radar at Kenai, about 50 nautical miles southwest of Anchorage, detected the aircraft passing near Cairn Mountain roughly 27 minutes after takeoff, already about 6 nautical miles north of its expected position. Military radar at King Salmon showed it about 12 nautical miles north of its Bethel waypoint, continuing to drift. There is no evidence that anyone monitoring those radar feeds that night recognised the deviation or alerted the crew. The ICAO analysis of the flight data recorder concluded that the autopilot had almost certainly remained in HEADING mode after the point where it should have been switched to INS, because either the crew never made the switch, or the aircraft had already drifted beyond the 7.5-nautical-mile tolerance needed for INS capture. With no waypoint check correcting the heading, the plane continued on a constant magnetic course. By waypoint NABIE it was 60 nautical miles north of route R20; by NUKKS, 100 nautical miles; by NEEVA, 160 nautical miles. That drift eventually carried it over the Kamchatka Peninsula and into Soviet airspace.

• 4. Interceptors in the Dark

  ›

  By the summer of 1983 the Cold War had reached a pitch of anxiety not matched since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet leadership, especially General Secretary Yuri Andropov and Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov, regarded the United States' Strategic Defense Initiative, the planned deployment of the Pershing II in Europe, and the FleetEx '83-1 naval exercise as signals of a coming preemptive nuclear strike. Andropov had initiated a secret intelligence program, code-named RYAN, to detect exactly such an attack. On the Kamchatka Peninsula, tensions ran higher still that night because a Soviet missile test at the Kura Missile Test Range was scheduled for September 1, and a United States Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft was already in the area monitoring it. Four MiG-23 fighters were scrambled when KAL 007 approached, but they were unable to intercept the 747 before running low on fuel. A key warning radar on the peninsula had been knocked out by Arctic gales ten days earlier, and, according to Soviet Air Force Captain Aleksandr Zuyev, who later defected to the West in 1989, local officials had falsely reported to Moscow that the radar had been repaired. Had it been working, Zuyev said, the plane could have been intercepted about two hours earlier, with ample time for identification. The 747 crossed the peninsula and re-entered international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk without being stopped. It was when the aircraft re-entered Soviet airspace over Sakhalin that three Su-15 fighters from Dolinsk-Sokol airbase and a MiG-23 from Smirnykh Air Base finally made visual contact. Because of the darkness, the pilot of the lead Su-15, Major Gennadiy Osipovich, was unable to make a definitive identification from his fighter's cannon warnings. He fired more than 200 rounds of armor-piercing shells, which he later admitted were invisible against the night sky. The plane was climbing toward flight level 350 when the order came down from General Anatoly Kornukov to fire. General Valery Kamensky had insisted that the plane be positively identified as non-civilian before destruction, but Kornukov held that no identification was needed since it had already flown over Soviet territory. Army General Ivan Tretyak ultimately authorized the weapons.

• 5. What the Pilot Knew

  ›

  In a 1991 interview with Izvestia, Osipovich said that while flying alongside the 747 he could see "two rows of windows" and understood it was a Boeing. He recalled telling ground controllers there were "blinking lights" on the aircraft but chose not to report that it was a civilian type, because, as he put it, "they did not ask me." He stated: "I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing." When the Boeing began to slow as it climbed from flight level 330 to flight level 350, Osipovich interpreted the deceleration as an evasive maneuver. He overshot the aircraft and then maneuvered below it, switched on his missiles, and pulled the nose up sharply. Two K-8 missiles were fired at approximately 18:26 UTC. In his own recounting he described having already expended 243 rounds of cannon shells, ruling out further gun fire, and having briefly considered ramming the airliner before rejecting it as "poor taste." He also acknowledged in the same interview that the later official Soviet account contained invented details: that the plane had flown without running lights, that tracer rounds had been fired, and that radio contact on the emergency frequency of 121.5 megahertz had been attempted. Osipovich died on the 23rd of September 2015.

• 6. Twelve Minutes of Flight

  ›

  Cockpit voice recorder tapes recovered later showed the crew was unaware of both their navigational deviation and the incoming missiles. Immediately after detonation the 747 arced upward for 113 seconds, driven by damage to the crossover cable between the left inboard and right outboard elevators. At 38,250 feet the autopilot disengaged. The crew reported to Tokyo Area Control Center that the aircraft would descend to 10,000 feet. ICAO analysis of the digital flight data recorder showed that the plane instead leveled at 16,424 feet and held there for nearly five more minutes. The last entry in the cockpit voice recorder was at 18:27:46. The aircraft then began spiraling downward over Moneron Island for 2.6 miles before it broke apart in mid-air and hit the ocean just west of Sakhalin. A Japanese fisherman aboard the 58th Chidori Maru heard the plane at low altitude and then reported "a loud sound followed by a bright flash of light on the horizon, then another dull sound and a less intense flash of light on the horizon" and smelled aviation fuel. The aircraft vanished from long-range military radar at Wakkanai, Japan, at a height of 1,000 feet. ICAO analysis found that the first missile had detonated 50 meters behind the plane, sending fragments forward that punctured the pressurized fuselage to a total rupture area of 1.75 square feet. Three of the four redundant hydraulic systems were damaged or destroyed.

• 7. The Search and the Cover-Up

  ›

  The Soviet Union did not acknowledge shooting down the aircraft until September 6, five days after the event. Eight days after the shoot-down, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told the world the Soviet military did not know where the plane had gone down. In 1992, documents disclosed by Boris Yeltsin showed that at least two search and rescue missions were ordered within half an hour of the attack; Soviet searchers located the wreckage at a depth of 174 meters near Moneron Island after three days, and the cockpit voice recorder was recovered on the 20th of October 1983, fifty days after the shoot-down. A November 1983 memo from KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov and Defence Minister Ustinov to Andropov confirmed that the recorders had been forwarded to Moscow for analysis. The Soviets decided to suppress this because the tapes did not support their claim that KAL 007 had been on a deliberate intelligence mission. An ICAO hearing on the 15th of September 1983, heard the head of the Federal Aviation Administration state that the Soviet Union had refused to permit search and rescue units from other countries to enter its territorial waters and had blocked access to the likely crash site. Task Force 71 of the U.S. Seventh Fleet spent weeks searching an area of 225 square miles in international waters and found nothing. Its commander later assessed that had the task force been permitted to search without the restrictions imposed by Soviet-claimed territorial waters, the aircraft stood a good chance of being found. Hans Ephraimson-Abt, whose daughter Alice had been on the flight, chaired the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims. He flew to Washington 250 times and met with 149 State Department officials pursuing answers. He persuaded senators Ted Kennedy, Sam Nunn, Carl Levin, and Bill Bradley to write to Mikhail Gorbachev requesting information, and in October 1992 he led a family delegation to Moscow at Yeltsin's invitation. At St. Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin, the delegation was handed partial transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder and Politburo documents. The flight recorder tapes themselves were handed to the ICAO in Paris on the 8th of January 1993, nearly a decade after the aircraft went down.

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

  ›

  President Reagan described the shoot-down on the 5th of September 1983 as the "Korean airline massacre," calling it "a crime against humanity" and "an act of barbarism." The following day, U.S. ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick played intercepted audio of Soviet pilots' radio conversations before the United Nations Security Council. On September 12 the Soviet Union used its veto to block a UN resolution condemning it. An emergency session of the ICAO was held in Montreal, and in May 1984 the Convention on International Civil Aviation was unanimously amended to state that every nation must refrain from using weapons against civil aircraft in flight; that amendment came into force on the 1st of October 1998. The shoot-down had two lasting technical consequences. The United States altered tracking procedures for aircraft departing from Alaska. More enduringly, Reagan issued a directive making the military's satellite-based radio navigation system, the Global Positioning System, freely available to civilian users once it was sufficiently developed. Reagan closed Aeroflot's ticket offices in the United States and added restrictions to the airline's routes. The ICAO released its initial report on the 2nd of December 1983, concluding that the airspace violation was accidental and attributing the navigational failure to a lack of crew situational awareness. Its revised report of May 1993 incorporated the newly released Soviet recorder data. A 1993 Russian Federation inquiry absolved the Soviet hierarchy of blame, ruling the incident a case of mistaken identity, a finding that diverged sharply from the third Yeltsin memo, which acknowledged that the Soviet interceptor had made no radio contact attempt and had not fired tracer rounds, contrary to official Soviet statements made for a decade.