Korean Airlines Flight 007: Tragedy & Conspiracy? Pt One

In 1983 Cold War tensions had escalated due to several factors. These included the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative-SDI-or Star Wars, announced by President Reagan in March 1983. With this proposal the US would develop weapons that used a kind of energy beam to knock incoming Soviet missiles before they could reach their target. The planned and executed deployment of the Pershing II missiles in Europe in March and April. Also FleetEx '83, the largest fleet excercise held to date in the North Pacific. Aircraft from the USS Midway and the USS Enterprise repeatedly flew over Soviet military installations in the Kurile Islands, resulting in the dismissal or reprimanding of Soviet military officials who had been unable to shoot down the intruding aircraft. I also believe the Kurile Islands incidents will become somewhat important later in this story. On the Soviet side Operation RYAN (a Russian acronym for Raketno Yadernoe Napadenie-Nuclear Missile Attack) was also expanded. RYAN had been instituted by then KGB chairman Yuri Andropov (later to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after Brezhnev's death) in 1981 because he and his advisers thought the USA was planning a nuclear first strike on the USSR. Lastly, there was a heightened alert around the Kamchatka Peninsula when KAL 007 in the vicinity, because of a Soviet missile test that was scheduled for the same day. The missile test was the reason that a United States Air Force RC-135 reconaissance aircraft was patrolling off the peninsula.

With all of these heightened Cold War tensions the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean Airlines Boeing 747 on 1 September 1983. The loss of life aboard the aircraft was complete-all 269 people aboard died. KAL 007 was shot down while it was flying over the Sea of Japan, just west of Sakhalin Island over prohibited Soviet airspace. Lawrence McDonald, a member of the US House of Representatives from Georgia's seventh district was among those killed. There was an irony in this in that even though McDonald was a Democrat, he was violently anti-detente with the Soviets and was even a member of the ultra-conservative John Birch society. One would be hard pressed to find a more anti-Soviet, anti-communist person in Congress at the time. This incident also made McDonald the only US congressman to be killed by the USSR during the Cold War-albeit in a roundabout way. KAL 007 was en route from New York City with a layover in Anchorage, Alaska and from there was supposed to arrive in Seoul, South Korea. The flight strayed into Soviet airspace because of a navigational error.

The incident sparked one of the most tense moments in the renewed Cold War of the early 1980s that began with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the 40th President of the United States and also the oldest ever elected to the office. It led to an escalation of anti-Soviet sentiment, especially in the United States. The Soviet Union initially denied knowledge of the incident but later admitted to shooting down the aircraft after almost a week, and even then was not telling the whole story of what they had done or how it had happened. The Polituro of the USSR took the line that the incident was an act of provocation by the USA. The USSR thought that the flight navigation data had been altered-perhaps during the Anchorage layover-to take the wrong flight path to test the Soviet Union's military preparedness, or to even provoke an out and out war. The USA accused the USSR of obstructing search and rescue operations. Also the USSR's military suppressed evidence sought by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) investigation, including the flight data recorders, which were eventually released nine years later when the USSR had ceased to exist.

As a result of the incident, the United States altered tracking procedures for aircraft departing from Alaska, while interface of the autopilot used on airliners was redesigned to make it more failsafe. President Reagan ordered the US military to make the Global Positioning System (GPS) available for civilian use so that navigational errors like that of KAL 007 could be averted in the future.

KAL 007 was a Boeing 747-230B and carried 246 passengers and 23 crewmembers. The aircraft had an unusually high ratio of passengers to crew due to employees of Korean Airlines using free tickets (deadheading) for vacations and crewmembers returning back home after working flights already. There were 80 unused seats and twenty-two children under the age of twelve aboard. 130 passengers planned to connect to other destinations such as Tokyo, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolin, Senator Steven Symms of Idaho and Representative Carroll J. Hubbard of Kentucky were on board 007's sister flight-KAL 015, which flew 15 minutes behind KAL 007. They were also headed to Seoul in order to attend ceremonies of the 30 year anniversary of the US-Korean Mutual Defense Treaty.

After taking off from Anchorage, the aircraft turned left, seeking its assigned route JetRoute 501 (J501) which would take it over the navigational beacon at Bethel, Alaska. Here the aircraft would enter the northern-most of 5 50 mile wide airways known as the (NOPAC) or North Pacific routes, the bridge between the Alaska and Japanese coasts. KAL 007's particular airway R-20 (Romeo 20), passed just 17.5 miles (28.2km) from Soviet airspace off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. There were two navigational systems in use at the time for commercial aircraft, each of which was required for different phases of the flight. The inertial navigation (INS) mode, where the aircraft follows a set of pre-programmed waypoints and the HEADING mode, where the autopilot flies an aircraft along a constant magnetic heading. The Anchorage VOR (VHF Omni-directional radio range) was not operational at the time because of maintenance. The crew was notified of this fact, but this wasn't seen as a problem because the captain could still check his position at the VOR beacon at Bethel, Alaska, 346 miles (557km) away. However, the aircraft had to navigate on a magnetic heading to the Bethel beacon before it could start to use the INS mode to follow the waypoints that comprised route Romeo-20 around the coast of the USSR to Seoul. Since this leg was undertaken in the dark pilotage (using visual fixed points of reference on the ground or sea to check position) could not be used to assist the crew in navigating the route.

At about 10 minutes after take-off, KAL 007, flying on a heading of 245 degrees, began to deviate to the north of its assigned route to Bethel; it would continue to fly this way for the next 5 and a half hours. ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) simulations and analysis of the flight data recorder determined that this deviation was probably caused by the aircraft's navigation system operating in HEADING mode, after the point it should have been switched to INS mode. According to the ICAO, the autopilot was not in the INS mode for one of two reasons. Either the crew did not switch the autopilot to INS mode or they selected the INS mode, but didn't activate, as the aircraft had already deviated off track by more than 7.5 nautical miles (13.9km) tolerance permitted by the inertial navigation computer. In both scenarios, the autopilot remained in HEADING mode, and the problem wasn't detected by the crew.

KAL's divergence prevented the aircraft from transmitting its position via short range VHF radio. It therefore requested its sister flight-015 to relay reports to air traffic control on its behalf. At 14:43 GMT KAL 007 directly transmitted a change of its estimated time of arrival (ETA) for its next waypoint to the flight service stations at Anchorage. However, it did this using high frequency (HF) instead of VHF (Very High Frequency). High frequency transmissions are able to carry a longer distance than VHF but VHF is preferred by flight crews because it is not so vulnerable to static and interference. The inability to establish direct radio communications to be able to transmit their position directly did not alert the pilots of 007 to their ever increasing divergence. Halfway between Bethel and waypoint NABIE, KAL 007 passed through the southern portion of the North American Air Defense buffer zone. This zone, monitored intensively by the NSA (National Security Agency) is north of Romeo 20 and off-limits to civilian aircraft.

KAL 007 continued its journey, its rate of deviation ever increasing-60 nautical miles (110km) off course at waypoint NABIE, 100 nautical miles off course at waypoint NUKKS and 160 nautical miles (300 km) off course at waypoint NEEVA until it reached the Kamchatka Peninsula. The reasons put forward for the aircraft's deviation range from the pilots lack of knowledge about the situation to a planned and intentional deviation. Both sides of the argument note that the pilots from Bethel onwards had several sources of information that could have alerted them to their increasing deviation from their planned route.

The horizontal situation indicator (HSI) should have alerted the pilots of their course deviation. The needle of each pilot's HSI, capable of showing a deviation of only 8 miles (13km) should have been "pegged" all the way to the side. The pilots, therefore should have been aware they were at least 8 miles off course. Despite this at 13:49 GMT, the pilots were reporting they were on course, whereas 50 minutes after takeoff from Anchorage, military radar at King Salmon, Alaska saw they were more than 12.6 miles (20.3km) off course. The deviation exceeded the expected accuracy of the INS (2 nautical miles or 3.7km an hour) by a factor of 6. The pilots should also have been aware of the aircraft's serious deviation now, much more than 12 miles (19km) because 007 was too far off course for the pilots to make VHF radio reports, instead relying on their sister flight KAL 015 three times in total to do this for them. At one point in this part of its flight (14:43 GMT) 007 put a call through navigational "hookup" the International Flight Service Station on HF. KAL 007, now too far to speak directly with Anchorage controllers through VHF was transmitting its messages indirectly using HF. At another point of this section of the flight, at waypoint NABIE, 007 was too far north to make radar contact with the VHF air traffic control relay station on St. Paul's Island-KAL 015 relayed for 007.

The message was a change in ETA for the next waypoint (NEEVA), delaying by 4 minutes the ETA that KAL 015 had previously relayed for 007. Since a revised ETA could only be calculated by means of readout information presented by 007's Inertial Navigation Systems Control Display unit, pilot and co-pilot were once again presented with the opportunity of verifying their position and becoming aware of their enormous deviation. The contrary wind conditions of 007 and 015: When 007 passed out of Kamchatka airspace and was a few minutes into international airspace, over the Sea of Okhotsk, it was heading in the direction of Terpenie Bay on the west shore of Sakhalin Island. At the same minute (18:05 GMT) that Major Osipovich in his Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor fell in behind KAL 007 and reports to ground controllers "am observing" 007 was off course and 015, on course many miles away, and about 15 minutes behind 007, comparing wind velocity and direction. KAL 015 is encountering tailwinds while 007 is encountering headwinds: KAL 015: "Um Um We are now having an unexpected strong tailwind. How much do you get there? How much and in which direction? KAL 007: "206. Ask how many knots...? "KAL 007": "Ah! You got so much! We still got headwind. Headwind 215 degrees, 15 knots." KAL 015: "Is it so? But according to flight plan wind direction 360, 15 knots approximately." KAL 007: "Well it may be like this." Captain Chun (of Flt 007) by accepting these irreconcilables, has lost his last chance to escape.

Weather Radar: There was one last navigational aid to warn the crew. With consoles at the knees of both pilot and co-pilot, the plane's weather radar could have alerted them, both over Kamchatka and later over Sakhalin, to the fact they were no longer flying over water, as they ought to have been. Weather radar has 2 modes-land mapping for clear weather (when its possible to look down and see water or land masses) and weather surveillance mode for cloudy weather, when it is necessary to "see through" clouds in order to detect dangerous thunderstorms. KAL 007's mapping mode most likely in weather surveillance mode because of bad weather at the time. The ICAO's meteorological analysis concluded that "there was extensive coverage of low, medium and high level clouds over souther Kamchatka associated with an active cold front. ICAO's analysis of KAL 007's weather radar functioning stated, "it was concluded that the radar was not functioning properly or that ground mapping capability was not used. According to the ICAO, an indicator of pilot unawareness of the deviation of their flight and the danger they were in was the casual cockpit conversation at the times that awareness of deviation into hostile airspace would have increased tension and precluded this.

The image at the top is an artist's rendition of the same type of Korean 747 involved in the catastrophe. The second image is of the intended flight path of 007 with the deviation from it noted. I hope to be back with the rest of this series very soon. I don't think it will be that long. I wanted to talk about some other historical eras on the blog and thought this would be a good subject to start with. I do intend to stay mostly with ancient Rome up to a certain point but would like to do other topics here and there as well to prevent boredom (mine anyway:) from staying on one subject constantly. I do hope to be back with Augustus and his era very soon-by mid -September if not before. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Here are some links that I hope will be helpful or interesting and will have more in the future posts. Congressman McDonald HERE and an earlier incident in March of 1978 involving the shooting and forced landing of a Korean Airlines jet in 1978 HERE