Disaster Analysis : KAL Flight 007

A quarter of a century after Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007’s last flight, mystery still shrouds its final moments. On the face of it, the plane happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and was brought down. Fact is it’s one of the few recorded cases of a civilian passenger aircraft on a scheduled commercial flight being shot down by a military fighter aircraft.

KAL 007, a Boeing 747, departed Anchorage, Alaska on August 31, 1983 on its journey to Seoul, South Korea with 269 occupants, including 240 passengers, mainly South Koreans and Americans. Its principal mode of navigation was the Inertial Navigation System (INS) and its planned route was from Anchorage to the Japanese mainland, then to Seoul. Captain Byung-in had 10 years experience in the Korean Air Force and 11 years with KAL. He had an excellent safety record. He had flown the North Pacific route between Anchorage and Seoul 83 times, including 27 trips on the Romeo-20 route designated for this flight. Around 10 minutes after departure, for reasons never fully explained, the plane began to deviate to the West and North (or right) of its planned track to Japan. The inexplicable deviation (as later reconstructed from radar records) kept on increasing to 160 nautical miles, three and a half hours after takeoff, at which point the jetliner entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka peninsula—home of several top-secret Soviet military installations, hence an off-limits zone for civilian aircraft.

Soviet air defences tried to contact the unidentified intruder, first on radio, later via scrambled aircraft. The interceptors fired warning shots in front of the Boeing’s nose but the pilot could not have seen them since there were no tracer rounds. A few minutes later, the airliner exited Soviet airspace over the Sea of Okhotst and was left in peace. However, after about an hour it re-entered Soviet airspace, over Sakhalin Island. This time two Soviet fighters were scrambled with orders to destroy the target. The attack occurred at 18:26 GMT on August 31, 1983 (3.26 am on September 1, 1983, in Japan), with the sky still dark and most passengers probably asleep. Two air-to-air missiles were fired from a Su-15 Flagon of which one missile struck the airliner, while the other exploded in its close proximity. Years later, the attack pilot, Major Gennadiy Osipovich, acknowledged that from the flashing lights and the windows, he recognised the aircraft as a civilian type: 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.

Ground radars tracked the stricken plane for another 12 minutes until it disappeared near Moneron Island, around 275 nautical miles off its planned track. There was no Mayday call. Immediately dispatching boats, rescue helicopters, and civilian trawlers to the site, the Soviets steadfastly refused to permit search and rescue units from other countries to enter their territorial waters. In the days and months that followed, they insisted that KAL 007 had been on a spy mission. After several weeks, they handed over limited wreckage and some body parts—only a fraction of what might be expected from the crash of such a massive aircraft with so many people and their belongings aboard. The main wreckage was never found and no bodies positively identified as having been aboard Flight 007 were ever recovered.

How could a passenger aircraft, guilty of little more than a simple navigational error, be shot down with such tragic loss of life? Much of the information available came from Soviet reports, all steeped in Cold War rhetoric; from radio transmissions between the fighter jets and ground control (handed over only after the break-up of the Soviet Union), and from transmissions between the airliner’s flight crew and Tokyo ATC. Radar tracking by Japanese stations also provided key information. For many years the Soviets denied that the Cockpit Voice Recorder and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) had been found. When they finally did hand them over, both recordings stopped at exactly 1 minute 44 seconds after missile impact. Doctored? Perhaps.

One theory is that the jetliner did not crash, but instead made an emergency landing in Soviet territory (as was reported during the first few hours following the shoot-down) or ditched. There is a reasonable amount of circumstantial evidence to support this premise, though the Soviets strenuously denied it. In that case, there would have been survivors. What happened to them?

In defence of the Soviets it must be recalled that this was a period of extreme Cold War tension and their forces were on hair-trigger alert. After having issued adequate warning while the intruder flew over the Kamchatka peninsula, they were probably reluctant to let it get away a second time. Some observers speculate the Boeing may have been on a secret intelligence mission. Others aver that while the plane may have strayed inadvertently, US military trackers detected this, but issued no warnings, instead coldly exploited the situation to see how Soviet air-defence systems would react—in the process they gained a wealth of vital data about the enemy. During the early-morning hours of August 31-September 1, a US Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane was engaged in a mission to gather electronic intelligence, flying a racetrack course at sea off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Could the Soviets have mistaken the civilian Boeing for the RC-135, a legitimate target for attack?

An International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) investigation concluded that there was no evidence of the airliner being on an intelligence mission. The KAL 007 crew, it contended, could have deviated from the planned course either by committing a 10 degree error in programming the INS or by erroneously setting the Boeing 747 on a steady magnetic compass heading of 246 degrees. In order for the INS to capture the autopilot and keep it on the desired track, the autopilot had to be set to INS. The FDR shows that the INS never captured the autopilot; rather, KAL 007 flew at a constant magnetic heading of 246 degrees for the entire flight. If the INS had captured the autopilot, the magnetic heading would have changed with each leg of the desired track since the waypoints were not in a straight line.