The Death of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Peter Grier
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Death of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 By Peter Grier A 747 heading from the US to Seoul strayed into Soviet airspace. The USSR shot it down. s the fateful moment ap- lin, a sensitive and highly restricted transcript of his communications released proached, Maj. Gennadiy zone. Osipovich radioed superiors for by the US government. Osipovich sounded tense instructions but did not get an immedi- The Soviet pilot turned and dropped and frustrated. It was an early morn- ate response. below his lumbering prey. Then he ing hour on Sept. 1, 1983, and it had pulled his nose up, lit his afterburn- Anot been an easy time for Osipovich, An Infamous Act ers, and locked on with his own radar. an Su-15 fighter pilot assigned to the He could see that the mysterious At 3:26 a.m. Tokyo time, he fired two Soviet Union’s Dolinsk-Sokol Air Base multi-engine aircraft with blinking lights AA-3 air-to-air missiles. One of them, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. was apparently unaware of his presence. proximity-fused, exploded behind the He had been trying to find a target Suddenly it began to climb, slowing its target, severing a crucial control line. now looming a few thousand meters speed. Osipovich’s air combat controller The other hit the aircraft but its effect ahead of his aircraft. He was having ordered him to open fire. remains unclear. no luck. Soviet tracking radars had The authorization came too late. The “The target is destroyed,” radioed produced inaccurate data, for one thing. speedy Su-15 was suddenly right next to Osipovich. For another, he and other scrambled the aircraft it was supposed to destroy. But it had not been. The aircraft, pilots had been slow off the mark. “It should have been earlier. ... I’m Korean Air Lines 007, remained air- Now the target was close to leaving already abeam of the target,” radioed borne for at least 12 more minutes. Its Soviet airspace after flying over Sakha- an agitated Osipovich, according to a pilots struggled to regain control until 62 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 the airplane spiraled into the sea, near with intercepted air defense communica- Moneron Island just west of Sakhalin. tions and other evidence, Soviet leaders The shootdown of KAL 007 three admitted what had happened but said the decades ago was one of the deadliest aircraft was a spyplane sent to gather and most important events of the late intelligence from sensitive military Cold War. Two hundred sixty-nine pas- installations in the region. Illustration by Zaur Eylanbekov sengers and crew died when the airliner The Reagan Administration, for its hit the water. These included US Rep. part, charged that the USSR had know- Lawrence P. McDonald, a conservative ingly shot down an airliner and thus Democrat from Georgia. killed defenseless civilians in cold blood. The infamous act pushed US-Soviet President Reagan called the shootdown tensions to new heights and reinforced a “massacre” and an “act of barbarism.” each side’s worst assumptions about But US intelligence quickly discov- the other. ered that the story was more complicated. Initially, Moscow denied the incident National Security Agency intercepts had taken place. Confronted by the US showed that the Soviet Union had indeed Below: A map showing simplified divergence of the planned flight plath (dotted line) and the actual flight path of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Sept. 1, 1983. Mgarin73 viaWikipedia AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 63 Top to bottom: US Rep. Lawrence McDonald (D-Ga.), who was killed on intended flight paths only grew. By KAL 007. Soviet pilot Gennadiy Osipo- the time it neared an oceanic waypoint vich in the cockpit of a Soviet fighter. named “Nabie,” some 200 miles off the Osipovich during a Soviet television US Congress photo Alaskan coast, the airplane was already documentary about the shootdown. 100 miles away from where it should Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov during a Sept. 9, 1983, press conference in which he have been. claimed the shootdown was justified. The airplane wasn’t on its way to Seoul. Instead, it was traveling at a thought the aircraft to be a spyplane, heading of 245 degrees, flying like most likely an RC-135 eavesdropping an arrow toward the eastern portions aircraft that had been flying lazy-eights of the Soviet Union. According to an off the Sakhalin coast in advance of a investigation conducted by the Inter- forthcoming missile test. national Civil Aviation Organization in Furthermore, US intelligence showed 1993, following release of the airplane’s that, from the point of view of the Soviet original flight recorder tapes by the new military, anyway, the episode had been Russian government, the KAL crew a messy disaster. A Boeing 747 had activated an autopilot shortly after tak- flown a slow and predictable path over ing off from Anchorage and then turned Soviet territory for hundreds of miles, to 245 degrees to comply with an air overflying the Kamchatka Peninsula, traffic control clearance. The aircraft 1 re-entering international airspace, then maintained a heading of 245 degrees until crossing above Sakhalin. it was shot down some five hours later. Why did it go off course? The au- What Happened—Probably topilot—more specifically, the pilots’ Meanwhile the USSR air defense interaction with the autopilot controls— system had descended into “some- appears to be a large part of the answer. thing bordering on chaos,” according When the autopilot used in the KAL to intelligence historian Mathew M. airliner was set to “heading,” it directed Aid. Fighters were vectored poorly, the aircraft straight along that heading radar data was wrong, and pilots and path. The KAL 007’s pilots used this their superiors on the ground filled the setting just after takeoff. But when the airwaves with expletive-laced rants autopilot was turned to the mode “INS directed at each other. Navigation,” it was designed to guide “Arguably the most significant revela- the airplane along a series of pre-entered 2 tion coming out of the KAL shootdown waypoints to its ultimate destination. was the fact that the massive Soviet KAL was supposed to use this mode, national air defense system had not per- riding the autopilot along a transoceanic formed well at all,” wrote Aid in his 2009 route with 10 waypoints just outside of Soviet documentary screen shots history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry. Soviet territory, all the way to Seoul. How did a civilian aircraft flying That didn’t happen. Possibly, the straight and fairly level end up hun- pilots just forgot to turn the switch. It dreds of miles off course in dangerous is also possible that they set the switch, territory? but the INS Navigation mode did not That’s a central question of the KAL activate. 007 event. Conspiracy theorists have In the model autopilot used in that long pushed the idea that some sort of particular 747, the aircraft had to be dark US government plot lay behind within 7.5 miles of its preprogrammed the airplane’s actions that night. But route for INS Navigation to take over. 3 the simple fact of crew error, combined If it was farther away, or flying in the with continued inattentiveness, appears wrong direction, the autopilot stayed in to have put the Boeing airliner on a col- heading mode until the gap closed. If the CIA photo lision course with disaster. gap didn’t close, the aircraft just kept KAL 007 originated in New York. on jetting along the previous heading At 4:00 a.m. local time, the airliner until the pilots noticed or something took off from its intermediate stop in else intervened. Anchorage, Alaska, headed for Seoul. In 1993, after examining all the As it flew west it began to slowly devi- evidence, that’s what ICAO concluded ate from its planned route. KAL 007 had occurred. should have passed over a navigational “The maintenance of the constant waypoint at Bethel, Alaska, on its way magnetic heading and the resulting to the open ocean, but when it reached track deviation was due to the crew’s Bethel it had already strayed 12 miles failure to note that the autopilot had north of its intended path. As it flew either been left in the heading mode or 4 on, the distance between its actual and had been switched to the inertial naviga- 64 AIR FORCE Magazine / January 2013 tion system (INS) when the aircraft was Navigation mode but did not detect towards the USSR was an RC-135,” beyond range for the INS to capture the that the INS system was not steering according to the ICAO. desired track,” stated the ICAO in 1993. the autopilot,” wrote Degani. Nearly four hours after its takeoff The pilots had almost certainly been So KAL 007 lumbered on, head- from Anchorage KAL 007 entered the trained how to use the autopilot in the ing for Siberia instead of Seoul. After restricted airspace of the Kamchatka correct way, but human interaction with several hours it neared a buffer zone Peninsula. Four MiG-23s scrambled complex automated systems is often of international airspace monitored by to intercept the aircraft and first flew fraught with problems, according to a the Soviet military for possible threats. east, then west to try and run down 2004 book on the issue, Taming HAL: Here a complication developed: A US their unidentified target from behind. Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001, by Air Force Boeing RC-135 was already But the Soviet fighters ran low on fuel Asaf Degani, a scientist from the NASA flying in wide circles in this area.