KAL 007: The Real Story

...T he Boeing 747 took off from Anchorage at 13:00 GMT on August 31...

...This piece of sensational news, however, never made it into print in the West...

...CAO's report had to reconstruct the airliner's actual flight path based on a computer simulation using measured aircraft performance parameters...

...They later ordered the pilot to lie about the lights when interviewed...

...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...

...The CVR contains taped advisories to the passengers to fasten their seat belts and put on oxygen masks...

...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...

...At first they presumed it was a KC-135 refueling plane...

...has always claimed) and that the radar units never confused one with the other...

...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...

...The doomed airliner had been flying over international waters for at least half a minute before being struck down...

...So damning were these conversations and instrument readings that Soviet officials vowed to keep the evidence secret forever...

...The chain of accidental circumstances that would lead tothe 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...

...Another version alleged that Richard Nixon had been booked on the flight (or even had boarded the flight) but had been "warned off...

...By the time the airliner was off its assigned course, it was out of range of Alaska-based radar coverage...

...But the Russian-language term unambiguously refers to an electronic query, not a verbal one...

...The order went up to destroy the intruder...

...The ICAO's final report of its investigation of this long-hidden data was released on June 14...

...Finally they stopped, simultaneously, while the aircraft was still "high in the air...

...The structural materials were torn apart, and even recovered cabin silverware showed the force of the impact...

...The recovered tapes show that such words were never spoken...

...In one incident shortly after the shootdown, a 747 went sixty nautical miles off course in just two hours...

...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...

...The Soviets expected a deliberate intruder to be flying with lights out...

...One agent kept trying to interest U.S...

...It was much larger, he realized, though he would later argue that he wasn't trained in identifying civil aviation aircraft...

...So there was some uncertainty as to exactly where the airliner was when themissiles 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...

...culpability allege that whatever the original intentions of the pilots, their course deviation should have become obvious to U.S...

...Later, the Soviets lied about there being tracers, and the pilot was ordered to lie too, but he is unambiguous in his testimony...

...A s 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...In fact, the boxes were colored bright yellow, to make them easier to find in the event of catastrophe...

...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...

...But, tragically, all these opportunities were overlooked...

...According to ICAO, 007's voice tape "indicated a normal, relaxed atmosphere on the flight deck...

...The plane continued to descend under control, but it was doomed...

...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...

...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...

...Presumably the aft bulkhead on which they were mounted collapsed from earlier structural damage...

...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...

...Instead, he launched his rockets...

...Advocates of U.S...

...In the latter case, the INS computers would not "capture" the autopilot, which would continue following the original compass heading...

...And among all the jets, surely one of them had been close enough for a visual inspection...

...air space controllers, and that the subsequent failure to warn the aircraft implied either foreknowledge or incompetence...

...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...

...And he did not radio to the ground that his visual inspection disproved the RC-135 presumption...

...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...

...The actual INS location calculations were not recorded...

...The immediate cause of ordering the missile attack was not the airliner's continuing penetration of Soviet air space, but its imminent departure...

...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...

...No Boeing 747, damaged or not, had ever successfully ditched at sea...

...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...

...Then, oddly, after almost a decade of Soviet cover-up, the full truth about the tragedy got "spiked" in the Western press...

...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...

...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 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...

...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...

...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...

...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 was flying faster and straighter than any RC-135 had ever been observed to do, and ih fact no RC-135 had ever overflown Soviet airspace so nonchalantly (past penetrations had been made by supersonic jet fighters...

...officials' recollections...

...Neither the Soviet pilot nor any ground station ever called the airliner on the international distress frequency, as required by international standards...

...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...

...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...

...Conspiracy nuts insist that some sort of U.S...

...newsmen in a claim that this exact airliner had been seen at Andrews AFB near Washington getting spy gear installed...

...All four engines were still running, but critical control surfaces and lines had been damaged...

...It was within seconds of "escaping" across the border into international airspace...

...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...

...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...

...Either the crew forgot, or they manually engaged the INS when they were too far off the course it was automatically computing...

...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 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...

...military radar should have noticed the deviation...

...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...

...Here, then, for the first time in this country, is the real storyof KAL 007, as revealed by the final ICAO report, by the investigations of Russian journalists at the now-more-orless-honest lzvestiya daily newspaper, and from recent U.S...

...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...

...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...

...In the ICAO's words: "The time factor became paramount in the USSR command centers...

...Not a single major network even mentioned the new ICAO report...

...The airliner's two recorders continued to function for another minute after the attack...

...Meanwhile, KAL 007 was not quite overdue to appear along the expected route, so Japanese air traffic controllers had no reason yet to worry...

...And much of the media played into Soviet hands...

...politicians who would have believed the Soviets actually capable of the crime they were about to commit...

...The crew was interacting jovially with each other...

...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...

...ICAO concluded that there was no evidence the crew knew they were in Soviet air space or were being accompanied by a Soviet jet...

...As the lost airliner headed southwest over the west coast of Sakhalin, Soviet air defense officials had run out of time...

...None of the "conspiracy theory" assertions about the takeoff was authentic...

...But waypoint passage is automatically announced whether the airliner passes over the point or merely abeam of it...

...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...

...Waypoints are like highway exit signs for towns that might be on the highway or many miles away...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Toward the end, they grew increasingly noisy as air buffeting mounted...

...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...

...ICAO did not pursue this issue, but the U.S...

...S oviet radar units on the Kamchatka Peninsula were tracking a routine patrol of a USAF RC-135 when a second blip appeared...

...As an experienced border patroller, he recalled later realizing that the aircraft was clearly no RC-135...

...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...

...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...

...But when the nearest pursuing interceptor over Sakhalin reported the target was brightly lit, the military commanders shrugged it off...

...The two planes never "merged into one blip," as some Soviet propagandists claimed and many Western collaborators echoed...

...Among them was Georgia congressman Larry McDonald, an "ultra-conservative" whose anti-Soviet beliefs made him one of the few U.S...

...It should have been "close enough...

...The pilot was there, and he says there were no visible tracers in the rounds he fired...

...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 coordinates against the flight plan...

...The exact setting they seem to have chosen-246°—was taken right off the standard navigation charts...

...Sporadic equipment failures and geographic "masking" made precise tracking impossible, and several times the ground controllers directed interceptors onto the wrong course...

...They had been cleared directly to this point and were not required to follow any specific flight corridor...

...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...

...Not being a Soviet jet, the airliner did not carry this kind of equipment...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...But the airliner's path across Alaska gave no indication of navigation trouble...

...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...

...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...

...The civilian transponder could easily have been interrogated...

...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...

...Japanese fishermen observed the passage of the airliner, its lights out and aviation gas spraying wildly, until it smashed into the sea and exploded...

...Along the way, the INS computers would have shown the airliner passing mathematical milestones called "way-points," which would have lulled the crew into a false sense of security...