Remeber Korean airliner in 1983 that got shot down by Soviets?

Question

do u think it was the soviets being overly agressive or the americans using the plane to spy or test USSR's reaction times.

personally, i'm not russian i'm australian, and i belive it was USA spying. 500Km off course, come on!

Answer 1

eqmaniac52 is spot on with the "background" but the rest of his personal theory is just that. theory.

On the tenth anniversary of the shootdown, a U.N. sponsored report has cleared up all the lies and disinformation surrounding the flight and the Western press has chosen to ignore it.

For almost ten years, two battered and corroded aviation data recording devices were hidden away deep in Soviet military archives. These were the "black boxes" from Korean Airlines Flight 007, destroyed by a Soviet jet on September 1, 1983, with the loss of 269 lives. In fact, the boxes were colored bright yellow, to make them easier to find in the event of catastrophe. Their proper titles are the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), which recorded the last thirty minutes of crew voice communications, and the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR), which recorded dozens of operating parameters of the airplane's navigation and control systems over the entire flight.

Within a few weeks of the shootdown, Soviet naval forces had secretly recovered the boxes and other debris from the ocean bottom in international waters off the west coast of Sakhalin Island. And while Moscow military officials stridently insisted the airliner's course deviation was a "CIA plot" and the Soviet military attack was justified by the airliner pilots' not responding to signals, in private they read their own experts' reports on the purloined data recorders and shuddered. So damning were these conversations and instrument readings that Soviet officials vowed to keep the evidence secret forever.

And much of the media played into Soviet hands. As one London documentary producer put it, to be "sexy enough" to be noticed, any findings on the KAL 007 tragedy had at least to imply CIA complicity. Falsehoods, invented by KGB disinformation specialists and retailed by useful idiots in the West (see pages 38-39), cloak the origins of this particular flight. One agent kept trying to interest U.S. newsmen in a claim that this exact airliner had been seen at Andrews AFB near Washington getting spy gear installed. Another version alleged that Richard Nixon had been booked on the flight (or even had boarded the flight) but had been "warned off." Two more Soviet export fictions had the Korean pilot boasting to friends about his specially equipped spy plane, or privately sharing anxieties with his wife about "a particularly dangerous" mission.

A succession of Soviet leaders profited from the falsehoods, including Gorbachev, who at the height of glasnost, solemnly assured Western investigators that such records simply did not exist. "We have hidden them away where even our children won't be able to find them," boasted one military memo a few years after the disaster.

That memo fell into the hands of Yeltsin officials in early 1992, and it led them to the discovery of the original boxes and the top secret Soviet Defense Ministry reports about them. Yeltsin released those reports in October 1992, and in January 1993 he turned the black boxes over to the United Nations special group for the safety of commercial flying, the Montreal based International Civil Aviation Organization. The ICAO's final report of its investigation of this long-hidden data was released on June 14.

Then, oddly, after almost a decade of Soviet cover-up, the full truth about the tragedy got "spiked" in the Western press. Not a single major network even mentioned the new ICAO report. A brief and highly distorted piece appeared in the New York Times under the byline of a semi-retired aviation writer with a long penchant for "spy plane theories." Here, then, for the first time in this country, is the real story of KAL 007, as revealed by the final ICAO report, by the investigations of Russian journalists at the now-more-or-less-honest Izvestiya daily newspaper, and from recent U.S. officials' recollections.

The Boeing 747 took off from Anchorage at 13:00 GMT on August 31. On board were a crew of three, plus twenty cabin attendants, six "dead-heading" crew hitching a ride home, and 240 passengers, including sixty-one Americans. Among them was Georgia congressman Larry McDonald, an "ultra-conservative" whose anti-Soviet beliefs made him one of the few U.S. politicians who would have believed the Soviets actually capable of the crime they were about to commit.

None of the "conspiracy theory" assertions about the takeoff was authentic. There was no secret "extra fuel" (there was one digit error on one page of the flight plan), there was no "paying cargo removed to lighten the ship" (this was actually an entry describing the six off-duty crewmen), there was no pilot's annotation about his "Estimated Time of Penetration" into Soviet airspace (this "ETP" notation was the "Equal Time Point" between Anchorage and Tokyo, and was actually written down by an airline employee, not the pilot), and there was no "mysterious delay" of the takeoff (it was adjusted based on expected winds, so as not to arrive in Seoul too early in the morning).

The chain of accidental circumstances that would lead to the catastrophe began at takeoff, when the crew selected a magnetic heading mode for the autopilot to guide their aircraft towards the west coast of Alaska. (They had been cleared directly to this point and were not required to follow any specific flight corridor.) Once out over the northern Pacific, they planned to engage their inertial navigation system (INS), which had been properly programmed, to control the airliner through its autopilot.

Because the radio beacon normally used for navigation between Anchorage and the coast was out of service for maintenance, the crew had to rely on the less familiar heading-mode method. The exact setting they seem to have chosen, 246, was taken right off the standard navigation charts. It should have been "close enough."

But when the airliner crossed the Alaskan coast an hour later, the INS never took command of the autopilot, and the plane continued on the magnetic heading selected just minutes after takeoff for only the first leg of the journey. Either the crew forgot, or they manually engaged the INS when they were too far off the course it was automatically computing. In the latter case, the INS computers would not "capture" the autopilot, which would continue following the original compass heading. The switch would be in its correct position, and the problem would have shown up only on a small indicator easily overlooked, as it has been in dozens of similar navigation errors.

The recovered DFDR showed that the auto-pilot was controlling the flight path in a constant magnetic heading from four minutes after takeoff until the airliner was hit by Soviet missiles. The crew should have double-checking their course (as required by airline policy and by good airmanship), but pilots often have made exactly this kind of mistake. In one incident shortly after the shootdown, a 747 went sixty nautical miles off course in just two hours. A year later, a Southwest Pacific Airlines charter over the North Pole to Europe went almost a thousand miles off track and was headed toward Soviet air space before the crew finally realized they couldn't pick up any expected radio beacon.

Along the way, the INS computers would have shown the airliner passing mathematical milestones called "waypoints," which would have lulled the crew into a false sense of security. But waypoint passage is automatically announced whether the airliner passes over the point or merely abeam of it. Waypoints are like highway exit signs for towns that might be on the highway or many miles away. The actual latitude and longitude, as displayed, would have been incorrect, but the crew would have noticed this only if, as they were supposed to, but as many transoceanic crews don't, they had checked co-ordinates against the flight plan. The time to the next waypoint would have been correct, and the distance would have been close enough not to attract the crew's attention.

Advocates of U.S. culpability allege that whatever the original intentions of the pilots, their course deviation should have become obvious to U.S. air space controllers, and that the subsequent failure to warn the aircraft implied either foreknowledge or incompetence. But the airliner's path across Alaska gave no indication of navigation trouble. By the time the airliner was off its assigned course, it was out of range of Alaska-based radar coverage.

Conspiracy nuts insist that some sort of U.S. military radar should have noticed the deviation. Usually these claims came from self-styled experts who showed no understanding of the limits of radar scanning, or even of the actual locations of radars in the area. ICAO did not pursue this issue, but the U.S. Federal Court in Washington, D.C., ruled in May 1986 that there was no indication that military radars were even capable of seeing that the airliner was off course, much less that they had the ability or responsibility to identify it or warn it.

Soviet radar units on the Kamchatka Peninsula were tracking a routine patrol of a USAF RC-135 when a second blip appeared. At first they presumed it was a KC-135 refueling plane. Then, as the new aircraft flew unswervingly south of the region the RC-135 was patrolling, they presumed it was another RC-135, making a feint at the coast to see what radars were still operational after a recent autumn cyclone had knocked most of them out. Soviet military reports passed to ICAO by the Yeltsin government clearly show that the two aircraft were never closer together than 150 km (exactly as the U.S. has always claimed) and that the radar units never confused one with the other. The two planes never "merged into one blip," as some Soviet propagandists claimed and many Western collaborators echoed.

The following several hours of alarm among Soviet air defense forces are clearly portrayed by the transcripts of military command channels released to ICAO by the Yeltsin government. The original presumption that the intruder was an RC-135 was never seriously challenged, although some officers raised doubts, and pointed out that it was a very stupid intruder to be flying straight and level for so long. The groggy controllers made inquiries to Soviet civilian traffic control agencies, but instead of checking their commercial air radar scopes (on which the airliner's transponder echo would have clearly shown it to be civilian), they merely reported that there were no scheduled civil flights expected.

Sporadic equipment failures and geographic "masking" made precise tracking impossible, and several times the ground controllers directed interceptors onto the wrong course. Over Kamchatka, the jets (three pairs) never even found the intruder, and over Sakhalin the jets (at least five pairs, maybe six) barely caught up before the airliner had traversed the narrow neck of the island.

The Soviets expected a deliberate intruder to be flying with lights out. But when the nearest pursuing interceptor over Sakhalin reported the target was brightly lit, the military commanders shrugged it off. (They later ordered the pilot to lie about the lights when interviewed.) The pursuing pilot was told that an RC-135 would have four contrails, but then so would a 747 and dozens of other jet transports. The target still might have been a lost Soviet long-range bomber with a broken radio (several had been accidentally shot down over the years), so the pilot was instructed to interrogate the target's "Identify Friend or Foe" transponder. Not being a Soviet jet, the airliner did not carry this kind of equipment.

Conspiracy nuts have insistently mistranslated the Soviet pilot's report about the target "not responding to the call" as proof that 007 ignored a voice call. But the Russian-language term unambiguously refers to an electronic query, not a verbal one. Neither the Soviet pilot nor any ground station ever called the airliner on the international distress frequency, as required by international standards.

Many Western observers were incredulous that the Soviets could have tracked the intruder for so many hours and not have realized it was a civilian airliner. It was flying faster and straighter than any RC-135 had ever been observed to do, and in fact no RC-135 had ever overflown Soviet airspace so nonchalantly (past penetrations had been made by supersonic jet fighters). The civilian transponder could easily have been interrogated. And among all the jets, surely one of them had been close enough for a visual inspection. But, tragically, all these opportunities were overlooked.

According to ICAO, 007's voice tape "indicated a normal, relaxed atmosphere on the flight deck. The crew was interacting jovially with each other. . . . There was some indication by the first officer that he was finding the flight tedious, which would be improbable if the crew was deliberately transgressing a prohibited area." ICAO concluded that there was no evidence the crew knew they were in Soviet air space or were being accompanied by a Soviet jet.

On ground instructions, the Soviet pilot fired off a few bursts of cannon fire to attract attention, but he recalled feeling frustrated that there was no way this could work: he was too far behind, and the shells were all armor-piercing rounds, with no tracers interspersed. Later, the Soviets lied about there being tracers, and the pilot was ordered to lie too, but he is unambiguous in his testimony. Russian officials told ICAO it "is policy" to load tracers among the explosive shells, but "policy" is made at headquarters many thousands of miles from the front-line base where supplies and staff limitations force compromises. The pilot was there, and he says there were no visible tracers in the rounds he fired.

As was normal late in a flight, the airliner pilot called Tokyo control (while still out of direct radar range) and requested clearance to a slightly higher, more efficient cruising altitude. The airliner's natural slowing as it made this small change caused the pursuing interceptor to overshoot the plane, which convinced the Soviet pilot that the intruder had suddenly seen him and was taking evasive action. But according to the unarguable records of the DFDR, all other alleged course changes, including the massive dives and rolls and zigs and zags that fill maps and charts in conspiracy books (and in national newspapers), never happened.

During the last moments of the flight, the airliner and its pursuing jets over Sakhalin appeared on Japanese military radar. It looked just like many earlier pre-dawn intercept exercises (which is what the Soviet pilots had at first thought they were doing when launched). Japanese civil aviation radar also detected an airborne target with a transponder code of "1300," which was a neutral code for any aircraft over the northern Pacific (ICAO concluded it was a proper code for use prior to entry into Japanese air space, although conspiracy nuts have insisted it was some sort of signal). Meanwhile, KAL 007 was not quite overdue to appear along the expected route, so Japanese air traffic controllers had no reason yet to worry.

As the lost airliner headed southwest over the west coast of Sakhalin, Soviet air defense officials had run out of time. Although the presumption of the aircraft's reconnaissance nature had not been confirmed (all data collected had actually contradicted that theory), and no serious attempts had been made to contact it, the Soviets decided they couldn't take the chance. The order went up to destroy the intruder.

During those final moments, the pilot of the leading Soviet jet interceptor finally had time to study the aircraft a few miles in front of him. As an experienced border patroller, he recalled later realizing that the aircraft was clearly no RC-135. It was much larger, he realized, though he would later argue that he wasn't trained in identifying civil aviation aircraft. And he did not radio to the ground that his visual inspection disproved the RC-135 presumption. Instead, he launched his rockets.

The immediate cause of ordering the missile attack was not the airliner's continuing penetration of Soviet air space, but its imminent departure. It was within seconds of "escaping" across the border into international airspace. In the ICAO's words: "The time factor became paramount in the USSR command centers."

ICAO's report had to reconstruct the airliner's actual flight path based on a computer simulation using measured aircraft performance parameters. The actual INS location calculations were not recorded. So there was some uncertainty as to exactly where the airliner was when the missiles were launched, and that is what ICAO officially reported: "It was not possible to determine the position of KAL 007 at the time of the missile attack in relation to USSR sovereign airspace."

However, a supplemental report from the Russian Federation was also released through ICAO on June 14, and its information, based on ground radar measurements, is much more precise. It locates the spot of the missile attack at 46¡ 46' 27" N and 141¡ 32' 48" E. When plotted on ICAO's own maps of the shootdown area, this spot falls unambiguously outside Soviet territorial airspace. The doomed airliner had been flying over international waters for at least half a minute before being struck down. (This piece of sensational news, however, never made it into print in the West.)

The airliner's two recorders continued to function for another minute after the attack. Toward the end, they grew increasingly noisy as air buffeting mounted. Finally they stopped, simultaneously, while the aircraft was still high in the air. Presumably the aft bulkhead on which they were mounted collapsed from earlier structural damage.

The CVR contains taped advisories to the passengers to fasten their seat belts and put on oxygen masks. The pilot called out to Tokyo that he was experiencing a rapid decompression and was descending to ten thousand feet, where the air would be thick enough to breathe. On the tapes, there were no "crew calls" about "Gonna be a blood bath, you bet" and "Hold your bogies north, sir," and other nonsensical fantasies which the spy-flight nuts imagined they could hear in the static. The recovered tapes show that such words were never spoken.

The plane continued to descend under control, but it was doomed. All four engines were still running, but critical control surfaces and lines had been damaged. No Boeing 747, damaged or not, had ever successfully ditched at sea.

Japanese fishermen observed the passage of the airliner, its lights out and aviation gas spraying wildly, until it smashed into the sea and exploded. The main wreckage was concentrated in international waters 17 nautical miles north of Moneron Island, at 46¡ 33' 32" N, 141¡ 19' 41" E, at a depth of about 200 meters. The structural materials were torn apart, and even recovered cabin silverware showed the force of the impact. The bodies of the people on board were also torn to shreds, soon to float away or to be devoured by local cuttlefish which swarm over the bottom. Soviet divers searching for the data recorders later spotted scattered remains, a severed arm, a woman's scalp, a glove with a hand still inside.

Answer 2

Yes the Soviets were being way too aggressive for their own good, and the USA had some spy planes nearby (how did we know of the incident), so whether intentionally or not it was a good (too good) test of Soviet reaction times.

The Cold War had many examples of the USA and USSR sending aircraft to test each other's defences (the USSR sent their bombers routinely over the North Pole, and yes there's the USA spyplanes that were almost always in or near Soviet airspace). This would however be the first time I ever heard the USA use civilian (and non-USA) aircraft to do it...

Answer 3

How odd. What could you really spy on from an airliner? And why were the Americans using a Korean Airliner? I smell a conspiracy theory brewing...

I agree with both your statements, that the soviets were being overly aggressive and the plane had to be doing something fishy to be 500km off course...but then, is that really alot for an airplane? I don't know...

Answer 4

I thought it was already proven it was the soviets being overly aggressive, but it did prove a grisly benefit to military strategists testing soviet reflexes. Just as the attack on pearl harbor proved a grisly reason for turning Americans from isolationists into war avengers and just as the 9/11 attacke made us apply ourselves to the war on terror.

The conspiracy theorists jump to conclusions to fast, but its just a matter of the govt taking advantage of bad situations. The biggest proof is the lack of competency within the govt to carryout collassal scams and the numbers of people involved would've been incalculable...a leak surely would've happened.

Answer 5

Same with the Kursk. Remember the submarine? Apparently it got shot by Americans who were caught while spying out of their territorial waters. That is why Putin refused to send international rescue teams to the scene of the crime: he needed to cover up what really happened and to hide the secrets that were inside the Kursk. Apparently it was a secret warning from the Americans to the Russians that they should back off selling weapons to the Chinese.

Answer 6

Background:

A USAF RC-135 was flying a routine electronic intelligence mission northeast of Kamchatka at about the same time as the KAL007. The primary long-range Soviet radar systems were not operational at the time, so as the RC-135 flew on its "racetrack" course it appeared on the inbound leg, turned around, and then disappeared again. This pattern was repeated several times, until Flight 007 flew inbound on a track approximately 70 miles to the RC-135's inbound leg at roughly the time the plane should have re-appeared on their radars. The U.S. routinely conducted Burning Wind SIGINT/COMINT flights to test the USSR's air defense systems (and over the years lost several planes on such missions).

My personal belief:

The most persistent "off course" theory is that the flight was part of a deliberate U.S. intelligence-gathering effort. According to this theory, U.S. intelligence has a long history of "tickling" Soviet radar by deliberately flying planes into Soviet airspace and then recording the responses. As far back as the late '40s, U.S. military aircraft had engaged in this practice, and some were even lost in the attempt (see James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, 1983, about the National Security Agency). In 1983, the theory goes, U.S. intelligence wanted to use a civilian plane as "bait" to test the Soviet reaction to an incursion inside their borders. If caught, the pilot could claim innocence, that he was only "lost" - the plane would not need to be equipped with "smoking gun" spy gear since U.S. spy satellites and spy planes such as the RC-135 could record the various responses.

The Soviets of course advanced this argument, which was presented in detail by Soviet Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov at a press conference on September 9, 1983, covered by the world's press media. Speaking before a huge map showing the provocative intrusion of KAL 007 into Soviet airspace, Ogarkov bluntly argued that the intrusion "was a deliberate, thoroughly planned intelligence operation."

President Reagan dismissed such theories as Soviet propaganda. However, independent researchers published books which, at the very least, seem to substantiate some of the details of the allegations. For instance, David Pearson notes in his book (KAL 007: The Cover-Up) that the flightpath of KAL 007 "passed over Soviet missile-testing areas, over the sites of several large phased-array radars, and near the Soviet submarine pens at Petropavlovsk" on the Kamchatka peninsula. Similarly the plane passed within a few dozen miles of Soviet air and navy bases on Sakhalin island, and if it had not been shot down as it left Sakhalin airspace, Pearson says, it was "on a heading that would have taken it eventually over the Soviet military center at Vladivostok." Fifteen minutes behind KAL 007 in international airspace was another civilian plane, KAL 015, which relayed KAL 007's messages to ground control. Investigators James Gollin and Robert Allardyce published a 2-volume book (Desired Track, 1994) which analyzed the parts of the plane's flightpath which were recorded and are publicly known, and concluded it must have made deliberate turns, which undermined the theory that the plane was simply left on autopilot. In short, theorists allege there were too many inconsistencies with the various "accident" scenarios for the flight to have been innocent.

Its a win-win for the US. The civilian plane gets military intel. It most likely wouldn't be shot down. If it gets shot down, the US can condemn the actions and go all sorts of crazy about the USSR involvement (and thanks to Reagan's great acting...thats exactly what they did).

The USSR probably knew it was a commercial airliner. Fired warning shots, the plane continued, so they wanted to send a message. They shot the plane down with the mindset of "we know what you are doing, you want more people to die?". Probably thinking they could expose the US as scumbags sending innocent people to die in an effort to gather intel.

In reality, this conspiracy theory has a lot of backing, even by prominent figures (see the authors/books listed). It makes sense and is probably what happened.

Answer 7

Its quite simple, there is a russia penninsula directly between the US and korea, the pilot simply cut through it and was shot down. he was not 500km off course, he was exactly where his flight plan said he would be.

Today, the route used by that same flight is the standard route between the US and Korea.

Answer 8

Right. The US has such control over Korean civilian aircraft.

Answer 9

im with you on that were good at stuff like that i wanna know what they didnt want us to see that they would shoot down a jumbo jet full of people that order came from the top