Korean Air Lines flight 007

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Korean Air Lines flight 007
Boeing 747-230B, Korean Air Lines AN0597272.jpg
Accident summary
Accident type Launch
place west of Sakhalin
date September 1, 1983
Fatalities 269
Survivors 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Boeing 747-230B
operator Korean Air Lines
Mark HL7442
Departure airport John F. Kennedy International Airport , New York City , New York
USA
Destination airport Gimpo Airport , Seoul , South Korea
Passengers 240
crew 29
Lists of aviation accidents

Korean Air Lines flight 007 was the flight number of a civil Boeing 747 operated by Korean Air Lines , which was shot down by a Soviet interceptor on September 1, 1983 over international waters west of Sakhalin Island for violating the airspace . All 269 people on board were killed.

background

As early as 1978, Korean Air Lines flight 902 , a Boeing 707 , on the polar route from Paris to Seoul with a stopover in Anchorage , Alaska , had gone off course and entered Soviet airspace near Murmansk . The incident in which the aircraft was shot at by interceptors despite the clear identification as a civilian aircraft and forced to make an emergency landing had revealed the weaknesses of the Soviet air defense system.

Since 1979 the Cold War had gradually become acute again and the relaxation phase of the 1970s ended. The Soviet support for the revolutionary regimes in Angola and Nicaragua as well as the intervention in Afghanistan were seen in the USA as the expansionist efforts of the Soviet rulers. Under Presidents Carter and Reagan , they therefore increasingly supported resistance movements in these countries. Reasons for the very tense situation in 1983 were also the planned installation of American medium-range missiles of the Pershing II type and BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles in response to the stationing of Soviet SS-20s in Europe (see NATO double decision ) and the US Strategic Defense Initiative for a rocket shield in space.

The Soviet Union, for its part, saw itself threatened by this increased American involvement and, under the head of state and party leader Yuri Andropov - a former KGB chairman - has been trying harder since 1981 with Operation RJaN to uncover suspected preparations for attack by NATO. They were also seen behind the upcoming NATO exercise Able Archer 83 and the largest U.S. naval exercise in the Pacific to date, FleetEx '83. As part of FleetEx '83, US Navy reconnaissance aircraft repeatedly penetrated Soviet airspace in April of that year . This had led to replacements and reprimands for responsible Soviet officers who could not prevent this.

Reconnaissance aircraft Boeing RC-135 of the US Air Force

On the peninsula of Kamchatka , Sakhalin and the adjacent mainland were many sensitive military installations, including a target area for tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in Klyuchi . A Boeing there was also the day of the launch of the Korean Boeing RC-135 of the US Air Force on an ELINT mission before Kamchatka. This was supposed to monitor the telemetry of the planned test of an ICBM of the type RS-12M Topol ( NATO code name SS-25 "Sickle"), which according to the American opinion violated the SALT-II treaty .

Flight history

For Korean Airlines flight 007 from New York to Seoul on August 31, 1983, a Boeing 747-230B with the aircraft registration HL7442 was used. The first operator of the aircraft delivered on March 31, 1972 was Condor Flugdienst GmbH (registration D-ABYH), which had regularly used this aircraft on the routes from Germany to Spain and Thailand. On August 20, 1981, it was sold to Korean Airlines.

The machine took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport with a 35-minute delay after the scheduled departure time of 03:50 UTC (August 30, 1983, 23:50 local time UTC – 4). On board were 23 crew members, 6 Korean Airlines members out of service and 240 passengers, including Democratic Congressman Larry McDonald . After a refueling stop at Anchorage International Airport , she flew on to Seoul at 13:00 UTC (calculated at 5:00 local time UTC-8) under the command of Captain Chun Byung-.

After take-off, she was instructed to turn onto the North Pacific Route (NOPAC) R-20 at the Bethel checkpoint . This northernmost of five transpacific airways led over several waypoints to Japan , whereby it approached the Soviet airspace up to 28 kilometers before Kamchatka. Probably because the autopilot unnoticed in the mode HEADING ( rate hold) instead of INS ( inertial navigation ) remained, retained Korean Airlines Flight 007, however, during the entire flight a course of 245 degrees at, instead of following the pre-programmed waypoints. Therefore, after a short time the aircraft deviated from the planned route to starboard (= right).

Planned and actual flight route diagram

As early as 13:30 UTC, the air traffic control radar recorded Kenai Korean Airlines flight 007 nine kilometers north of the intended position. At 1:50 p.m., the King Salmon military surveillance radar detected the machine 20 kilometers north of the Bethel checkpoint. However, these deviations from the center line of the airway were not perceived as unusual. Already out of range of the air traffic control radar, the crew reported the flight over the control point to the Anchorage flight control center after the allotted time . She also reported Point NABIE a little later, although at this point in time she was already out of range for VHF radio due to the course deviation and had the message forwarded by the sister plane flight 015, which took off 15 minutes after her.

Flight 007 flew through the US air defense zone north of R-20, which was closed to civil traffic, crossed the course of the American Boeing RC-135 circling there and approached Kamchatka. At a distance of around 130 kilometers, the Soviet air surveillance alerted four MiG-23 - interceptors . However, due to communication problems, they were unable to catch the plane before they ran out of fuel. At 15:51 UTC, Flight 007 entered the restricted airspace over Kamchatka, crossed the peninsula and at 17:45 returned to international airspace over the Sea of ​​Okhotsk .

Launch

The aircraft was now heading for the island of Sakhalin and was classified as an enemy military target by the Soviet Air Defense Forces command for the Far East military district. Around 6 p.m. UTC, two Su-15 interceptors from the Dolinsk- Sokol military airfield and a MiG-23 from Smirnych had visual contact with the aircraft. The crew of Flight 007 allegedly did not notice the Soviet fighters despite warning shots. Rather, at the time, she was comparing weather data with Korean Airlines flight 015; the sister aircraft, flying on the correct course, had a tailwind, while Flight 007 had a headwind. Nevertheless, the crew still did not recognize their course deviation, which was now almost 500 kilometers. At 18:15 UTC she took the flight control center Tokyo permission one, of 33,000 feet (10,060 meters) to 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) altitude to rise.

Su-15 interceptor

When the speed of the Boeing 747 decreased due to the climb, this forced the interceptors to overtake, which was interpreted as an evasive maneuver. Since the machine was already approaching international airspace again, the air defense command issued the order to shoot it down. At 18:26 UTC, the pilot of the leading Su-15, fired Major Gennady Nikolaevich Osipovich, two air-to-air missiles of the type K-8 Kaliningrad (NATO reporting name AA-3 'Anab') from. The explosions of the proximity fuse-equipped warheads damaged the aircraft's control system and caused a sudden pressure drop in the cabin .

Apparently the crew did not yet recognize the situation and reported to Tokyo that they would drop to 10,000 feet (3050 meters) due to a pressure drop, but did not send a Mayday . She managed to maintain limited control for about ten minutes and intercept the machine at 16,424 feet (5000 meters). Then the plane went into a downward spiral near the island of Moneron . At 18:38 UTC, it disappeared below an altitude of 1,000 feet (305 meters) from the radar in Komsomolsk-on-Amur .

Search operations

The Soviet guided missile cruiser Petropavlovsk (left) shadows the American fleet tug USNS Narragansett as it searches for the wreck

Immediately after the crash, the Soviet forces ordered a search and rescue operation near Moneron. A joint American-Japanese- South Korean search operation took place in international waters. Due to the political tensions, the two sides did not agree on this. The Soviet Union denied western forces access to waters that it considered to be its sovereign territory. There were multiple confrontations between war and auxiliary ships on both sides.

After a three-day search, Soviet forces located the wreckage of Korean Airlines Flight 007 at a depth of 174 meters near Moneron. However, the discovery and recovery of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were kept secret. Only a few items of clothing were later handed over to an American-Japanese delegation on Sakhalin. A small number of body parts and smaller objects from the plane were washed ashore on the north coast of the Japanese island of Hokkaidō a week after the crash .

Political reactions

The Soviet Union first tried to hide the fact that Korean Airlines Flight 007 had been shot down. The TASS news agency only reported that an unidentified aircraft had been intercepted by Soviet fighters, but had escaped. The US took advantage of this for a propaganda offensive by releasing an unusual amount of intelligence material, which included the Soviet radio messages recorded by the Soviet fighters by American and Japanese eavesdropping stations in Wakkanai . On September 5, US President Reagan described the shooting as "a crime against humanity" that must never be forgotten, and an "act of barbarism" and "inhuman brutality".

After a meeting of the UN Security Council the following day, at which the American UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick presented tape recordings of Soviet radio communications, TASS admitted the shooting down for the first time. However, the Soviet leadership insisted that Korean Airlines Flight 007 was on a spy mission, entered Soviet airspace deliberately and unlit, and did not respond to radio calls. Accidentally flying away was impossible. She blamed the American secret service CIA for this "criminal, provocative act" and referred to the Boeing RC-135, which was operating off Kamchatka at the same time. On September 12, the Soviet Union vetoed the UN Security Council's condemnation of the shooting down.

On September 15, 1983, President Reagan withdrew the license to fly to and from the United States from the state-owned Soviet airline Aeroflot . This measure lasted until April 29, 1986. On September 16, Reagan also announced that it would release the satellite-based Global Positioning System for civilian use. In 1986 the USA, the Soviet Union and Japan agreed on a joint air traffic control system for the North Pacific.

Investigations

Diagram showing the deviation of Korean Airlines flight 007 from its intended course after taking off from Anchorage

After the incident, the North Pacific route R-20 was initially closed by the American Federal Aviation Administration and released again on October 2 after the navigation aids had been checked.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) carried out an investigation, which, however, had to do without the records of the flight recorders of Flight 007, which were kept under lock and key by the Soviet Union. On December 2, 1983, it published a preliminary final report, which assumed that the reason for the course deviation was an error in the operation of the autopilot. Either the HEADING mode was retained, or it was only set to INS when the machine was already outside the system's tolerance limit of 7.5 nautical miles (13.9 kilometers) from the course entered, and was therefore unnoticed in HEADING Mode remained. As a result, the control panel was changed to avoid this error. In 1984 the ICAO Assembly adopted a mandatory provision on the non-use of armed force against civil aircraft in the air to be included in the Agreement on International Civil Aviation instead of the previous mandatory provision in the Annex. The insertion came into force in 1998.

After the reform process in the Soviet Union, the Izvestia newspaper conducted a series of interviews in 1991 with those involved in the events, including the fighter pilot Osipovich and rescue workers. Osipowitsch explained that, contrary to what was officially shown by the Soviet side, Flight 007 had switched on its navigation lights and was not warned with tracer bullets. Although he fired over 200 warning shots from his on- board cannon before it was fired , without tracer ammunition it was doubtful whether anyone saw it. In 1996, Osipowitsch told the New York Times that the plane could be recognized as a passenger plane by its rows of illuminated windows: “But that meant nothing to me. It is easy to convert a civil aircraft type into a military one. ”Under the pressure of the situation, he did not report his findings to the ground station.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin first handed over the boxes of flight recorders from Korean Airlines flight 007 to South Korea in November 1992, then the tapes with the flight data and cockpit conversations to the ICAO. He also handed over Soviet copies of the conversations between the command posts on the ground and the interceptors, as well as several documents confirming the intentional cover-up of the events.

On this basis, the ICAO published a final final report in 1993. The new material confirmed that the crew of Korean Airlines Flight 007 did not appear to be aware of the off-course or the presence of Soviet fighters. Contrary to what the Soviet Union claimed, there was no call via the international emergency frequency. For an unexplained cause, however, the recordings of both flight recorders ended one minute and 44 seconds after the rocket hit, around ten minutes before the actual crash.

Alternative theories

Among the victims: anti-communist Congressman Larry McDonald

During the Cold War in particular, it was widely believed that Korean Airlines Flight 007 was actually an espionage flight designed to test the Soviet Union's air defense system or to divert attention from actual spy planes. These theories were supported by RW Johnson in his book Shootdown from 1986, but also Robert W. Allardyce and James Gollin in Desired Track: The Tragic Flight of KAL Flight 007 from 1994. As recently as 2007, the latter stated in a series of articles in Airways Magazine that the ICAO investigation only served to cover up.

In 1995, Michel Brun claimed in Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of KAL Flight 007 that the Boeing had spoken to air traffic control in Tokyo half an hour after the official launch time. In addition, a major air battle took place in the course of which the Soviet Air Force destroyed several US military aircraft. Korean Airlines flight 007 may have been shot down by a US warship or Japanese armed forces, similar to Iran Air flight 655 .

In circles of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society , the conspiracy theory was advocated that its then chairman, anti-communist Congressman Larry McDonald , was the target of the shooting down. In 1991, a study carried out on the initiative of Republican Senator Jesse Helms (who had been on Korean Airlines Flight 015) pointed to the possibility that the machine had been forced to land and that survivors were in Soviet captivity .

The International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors also takes this point of view . Its founder, Bert Schlossberg, who is the son-in-law of a passenger, published the book Rescue 007: The Untold Story of KAL 007 and its Survivors in 2000 . This organization is not to be confused with the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims , which campaigned for the investigation of the shooting and the compensation of the bereaved.

Processing in music, film and computer games

Gary Moore released a song about the incident called "Murder in the Skies" on the album " Victims of the Future, " which was recorded in late 1983 and released in 1984.

In 1988 the American television film "Shootdown" was broadcast, based on the book by RW Johnson. In 1989 another television film was released, "Tailspin" (German: "Todesflug KAL 007"), which tells the story from the investigators' perspective.

In the fifth episode of the ninth season of the Canadian documentary series Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit , the accident was filmed as Target is Destroyed (German title: released for shooting ). In simulated scenes, animations and interviews with bereaved relatives and investigators, reports were made about the preparations, the process and the background of the flight.

In the computer game Phantom Doctrine (2018) you are tasked with preventing the machine from being shot down by disrupting the Soviet radio link.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Report on Korean Airlines Flight 092 in the Aviation Safety Network, accessed March 2, 2009
  2. ^ Benjamin B. Fischer: A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare , CIA 2007, accessed March 2, 2009
  3. ↑ a b CIA: Did KAL-007 Successfully Ditch at Sea and were there Survivors? (PDF; 695 kB), pp. 23–28, on rescue007.org, accessed on March 2, 2009
  4. ↑ Boeing 747 MSN 20559 on airfleets.net
  5. ↑ a b c Asaf Degani: Korean Air Lines Flight 007: Lessons from the Past and Insights for the Future (PDF; 1.3 MB), NASA 2001, accessed on February 3, 2009
  6. ^ Grounds for the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, in the case of Fred Wyler and others v. Korean Airlines and others in the extended version of April 3, 1991 ( Memento of August 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on April 2 , 1991 March 2009
  7. ↑ Copy of the radio communications from Korean Airlines Flight 007 with air traffic control in Anchorage (Appendix to testimony by Walter S. Luffsey [FAA] before the subcommittee of the US House of Representatives on Transport, Aviation and Weather on September 19, 1983; PDF; 405 kB), accessed on March 2, 2009
  8. ↑ GEO Epoche eBook No. 1: The great catastrophes: Eight historical reports on events that shook the world, 6. Jumbo jet shot down, 1987
  9. ↑ W. Bittorf, A. Sampson: Sinking to one-zero-thousand ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1984 ( online - 15 October 1984 ).
  10. ^ Text of President Reagan's radio address, September 5, 1983 , accessed March 2, 2009
  11. ↑ Walter Isaacson, Johanna McGeary, and Erik Amfitheatrof: Salvaging the Remains , Time Magazine, September 26, 1983, accessed March 2, 2009
  12. ^ Philip Taubman, Keeping the Air Lanes Free: Lessons of a Horror , New York Times, September 17, 1987, accessed March 2, 2009
  13. ↑ ICAO press release on the preliminary final report of the investigation into flight 007 of December 13, 1983 ( Memento of February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 142 kB), accessed on March 2, 2009
  14. ↑ as Article 3 bis: wording in German translation
  15. ↑ according to footnote to Article 3 bis in the 8th edition (2000) of the agreement (PDF; 10.6 MB) adopted on May 10, 1984, entered into force in the ratifying states on October 1, 1998
  16. ^ English translation of the Izvestia series on Korean Airlines Flight 007 from 1991 on aviastar.org, accessed on March 2, 2009
  17. ↑ Michael R. Gordon: Ex-Soviet Pilot Still Insists KAL 007 Was Spying , New York Times, December 9, 1996, accessed March 2, 2009
  18. ↑ English translation of the Soviet documents covering up the events surrounding Korean Airlines flight 007 (PDF; 234 kB) on rescue007.org, accessed on March 2, 2009
  19. ↑ Copy of the cockpit voice recorder recording of Flight 007 on the Aviation Safety Network, accessed March 2, 2009
  20. ↑ ICAO press release on the final report of the investigation into Korean Airlines flight 007 from June 16, 1993  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 709 kB), accessed on March 2, 2009@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / legacy.icao.int  
  21. ^ Charles J. Stewart: The Master Conspiracy of the John Birch Society. From Communism to the New World Order . In: Western Journal of Communication 66, Issue 4 (2002). P. 425.
  22. ^ Book presentation of Rescue 007: The Untold Story of KAL 007 and its Survivors on rescue007.org, accessed on August 22, 2009.
  23. ↑ Jan Hoffman: Grieving Father's 14-Year Crusade Helps Air Crash Victims. New York Times, March 31, 1997, accessed March 2, 2009