Korean Air Lines Flight 007

Aircraft The aircraft flying as Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was a Boeing 747-230B jet airliner with Boeing serial number 20559. The aircraft was powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7A engines. It had been delivered new to Condor in 1972 as D-ABYH. It was sold to Korean Air Lines in 1979, re-registered HL7442 and was 11.5 years old at the time of incident. It was the 186th 747 built. Passengers and crew , who was aboard Flight 007 The Boeing 747 flying as Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed from Gate 15 of John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City, on August 31, 1983, at 00:25 EDT (04:25 UTC), bound for Kimpo International Airport in Gangseo District, Seoul, 35 minutes behind its scheduled departure time of 23:50 EDT, August 30 (03:50 UTC, August 31). The flight was carrying 246 passengers and 23 crew members. After refuelling at Anchorage International Airport in Anchorage, the aircraft departed for Seoul at 04:00 AHDT (13:00 UTC) on August 31, 1983. This leg of the journey was piloted by Captain Chun Byung-in (45), First Officer Son Dong-hui (47), and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong (31). Captain Chun had a total of 10,627 flight hours, including 6,618 hours in the 747. First Officer Son had a total of 8,917 flight hours, including 3,411 hours in the 747. Flight Engineer Kim had a total of 4,012 flight hours, including 2,614 hours on the 747. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 had an unusually high ratio of crew to passengers, as six deadheading crew were on board. Twelve passengers occupied the upper deck, first class, while in business class almost all of the 24 seats were taken; in economy class, approximately 80 seats were empty. There were 22 children under the age of 12 years aboard. One hundred thirty passengers planned to connect to other destinations such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taipei. United States Congressman Larry McDonald from Georgia, who at the time was also the second president of the conservative John Birch Society, was on the flight. The Soviets contended former U.S. president Richard Nixon was to have been seated next to Larry McDonald on KAL 007 but that the CIA warned him not to go, according to the New York Post and Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS); according to former Nixon aide Franklin R. Gannon, Nixon had received the offer but decided against it himself. Flight deviation from assigned route Less than a half-minute after taking off from Anchorage, KAL 007 was directed by air traffic control (ATC) to turn to a magnetic heading of 220°. In response, the plane immediately began a slight turn to the right, to align it with route J501, and less than a minute later (3 minutes after take-off) was on a magnetic heading of approximately 245°, The Anchorage VOR beacon was not operational at the time, as it was undergoing maintenance. The crew received a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) of this fact, which was not seen as a problem, as the captain could still check his position at the next VORTAC beacon at Bethel, away. The aircraft was required to maintain the assigned heading of 220 degrees until it could receive the signals from Bethel, then it could fly direct to Bethel, as instructed by ATC, by centering the VOR "to" course deviation indicator (CDI) and then engaging the autopilot in the VOR/LOC mode. Then, when over the Bethel beacon, the flight could start using INS mode to follow the waypoints that make up route Romeo-20 around the coast of the U.S.S.R. to Seoul. The INS mode was necessary for this route since after Bethel the plane would be mostly out of range from VOR stations. map showing divergence of planned and actual flight paths At about 10 minutes after take-off, flying on a heading of 245 degrees, KAL 007 began to deviate to the right (north) of its assigned route to Bethel and continued to fly on this constant heading for the next five and a half hours. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) simulation and analysis of the flight data recorder determined that this deviation was probably caused by the aircraft's autopilot system operating in HEADING mode, after the point that it should have been switched to the INS mode. According to the ICAO, the autopilot was not operating in the INS mode either because the crew did not switch the autopilot to the INS mode (as they should have shortly after Cairn Mountain), or they did select the INS mode, but the computer did not transition from "armed" to "capture" condition because the aircraft had already deviated off track by more than the tolerance permitted by the inertial navigation computer. Whatever the reason, the autopilot remained in HEADING mode, and the problem was not detected by the crew. But had the aircraft been steered under INS control, as was intended, such an error would have been far greater than the INS's nominal navigational accuracy of less than per hour of flight. KAL 007's divergence prevented the aircraft from transmitting its position via shorter-range very-high-frequency radio (VHF). It therefore requested KAL 015, also en route to Seoul, to relay reports to air traffic control on its behalf. KAL 007 requested KAL 015 to relay its position three times. At 14:43 UTC, KAL 007 directly transmitted a change of estimated time of arrival for its next waypoint, NEEVA, to the international flight service station at Anchorage, but it did so over the longer range high frequency radio (HF) rather than VHF. HF transmissions can typically be heard at a greater distance than VHF, but are vulnerable to electromagnetic interference and static; VHF is clearer with less interference and is preferred by flight crews. The inability to establish direct radio communications via VHF did not alert the pilots of KAL 007 of their ever-increasing divergence and was not considered unusual by air traffic controllers. Shoot-down interceptor In 1983, Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had escalated to a level not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis because of several factors. These included the United States' Strategic Defense Initiative, its planned deployment of the Pershing II weapon system in Europe in March and April, and FleetEx '83-1, the largest naval exercise held to date in the North Pacific. The military hierarchy of the Soviet Union (particularly the old guard led by Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov and Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov) viewed these actions as bellicose and destabilizing; they were deeply suspicious of U.S. president Ronald Reagan's intentions and openly fearful he was planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. These fears culminated in RYAN, the code name for a secret intelligence-gathering program initiated by Andropov to detect a potential nuclear sneak attack which he believed Reagan was plotting. resulting in the dismissal or reprimanding of Soviet military officials who had been unable to shoot them down. Lastly, there was a heightened alert around the Kamchatka Peninsula at the time that KAL 007 was in the vicinity, because of a Soviet missile test at the Kura Missile Test Range that was scheduled for the same day. A United States Air Force Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying in the area was monitoring the missile test off the peninsula. At 15:51 UTC, according to Soviet sources, Significant command and control problems were experienced trying to vector the fast military jets onto the 747 before they ran out of fuel. In addition, the pursuit was made more difficult, according to Soviet Air Force Captain Aleksandr Zuyev, who defected to the West in 1989, because, ten days before, Arctic gales had knocked out the key warning radar on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Furthermore, he stated that local officials responsible for repairing the radar lied to Moscow, falsely reporting that they had successfully fixed the radar. Had this radar been operational, it would have enabled an intercept of the stray airliner roughly two hours earlier with plenty of time for proper identification as a civilian aircraft. Instead, the unidentified jetliner crossed over the Kamchatka Peninsula back into international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk without being intercepted. In his explanation to 60 Minutes, Zuyev stated: "Some people lied to Moscow, trying to save their ass." The Commander of the Soviet Far East District Air Defense Forces, General Valeri Kamensky, was adamant that KAL 007 was to be destroyed even over neutral waters but only after positive identification showed it not to be a passenger plane. His subordinate, General Anatoly Kornukov, commander of Sokol Air Base and later to become commander of the Russian Air Force, insisted that there was no need to make positive identification as the intruder aircraft had already flown over the Kamchatka Peninsula. Units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces that had been tracking the South Korean aircraft for more than an hour while it entered and left Soviet airspace now classified the aircraft as a military target when it re-entered their airspace over Sakhalin. (from Smirnykh Air Base) managed to make visual contact with the Boeing, but, owing to the black of night, failed to make critical identification of the aircraft which Russian communications reveal. The pilot of the lead Su-15 fighter fired warning shots with its cannon, but recalled later in 1991, "I fired four bursts, more than 200 rounds. For all the good it did. After all, I was loaded with armor-piercing shells, not incendiary shells. It's doubtful whether anyone could see them." At this point, KAL 007 contacted Tokyo Area Control Center, requesting clearance to ascend to a higher flight level for reasons of fuel economy; the request was granted, so the Boeing started to climb, gradually slowing as it exchanged speed for altitude. The decrease in speed caused the pursuing fighter to overshoot the Boeing and was interpreted by the Soviet pilot as an evasive maneuver. The order to shoot KAL 007 down was given as it was about to leave Soviet airspace for the second time. At around 18:26 UTC, under pressure from General Kornukov and ground controllers not to let the aircraft escape into international airspace, the lead fighter was able to move back into a position where it could fire two K-8 missiles at the plane. Soviet pilot's recollection of shoot-down In a 1991 interview with Izvestia, Major Gennadiy Osipovich, pilot of the Su-15 interceptor that shot the aircraft down, spoke about his recollections of the events leading up to the shoot-down. Contrary to official Soviet statements at the time, he recalled telling ground controllers that there were "blinking lights". (the type fired at KAL 007) mounted on the wing of a Sukhoi Su-15 Commenting on the moment that KAL 007 slowed as it ascended from flight level 330 to flight level 350, and then on his maneuvering for a missile launch, Osipovich said: Osipovich died on September 23, 2015, after a protracted illness. Soviet command hierarchy of shoot-down The Soviet real-time military communication transcripts of the shoot-down suggest the chain of command from the top general to Major Osipovich, the Su-15 interceptor pilot who shot down KAL 007. In reverse order, they are: • Major Gennadiy Nikolayevich Osipovich, • Captain Titovnin, Combat Control Center – Fighter Division • Lt. Colonel Maistrenko, Smirnykh Air Base Fighter Division Acting Chief of Staff, confirmed the shoot-down order to Titovnin. • Lt. Colonel Gerasimenko, Acting Commander, 41st Fighter Regiment. • General Anatoly Kornukov, Commander of Sokol Air Base – Sakhalin. • General Valery Kamensky, Commander of Far East Military District Air Defense Forces. • Army General Ivan Moiseevich Tretyak, Commander of the Far East Military District. Post-attack flight At the time of the attack, the plane had been cruising at an altitude of about . Tapes recovered from the airliner's cockpit voice recorder indicate that the crew was unaware that they were off course and violating Soviet airspace. Immediately after missile detonation, the airliner began a 113-second arc upward because of a damaged crossover cable between the left inboard and right outboard elevators. At 18:26:46 UTC (03:26 Japan Time; 06:26 Sakhalin time), at the apex of the arc at altitude , ICAO analysis concluded that the flight crew "retained limited control" of the aircraft. However, this lasted for only five minutes. The crew then lost all control. The aircraft began to descend rapidly in spirals over Moneron Island for . The aircraft then broke apart in mid-air and crashed into the ocean, just off the west coast of Sakhalin Island. All 269 people on board were killed. The aircraft was last seen visually by Osipovich, "somehow descending slowly" over Moneron Island. The aircraft disappeared off long-range military radar at Wakkanai, Japan, at a height of . KAL 007 was probably attacked in international airspace, with a 1993 Russian report listing the location of the missile firing outside its territory at , although the intercepting pilot stated otherwise in a subsequent interview. Initial reports that the airliner had been forced to land on Sakhalin were soon proven false. One of these reports conveyed via phone by Orville Brockman, the Washington office spokesman of the Federal Aviation Administration, to the press secretary of Larry McDonald, was that the FAA in Tokyo had been informed by the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau that "Japanese self-defense force radar confirms that the Hokkaido radar followed Air Korea to a landing in Soviet territory on the island of Sakhalinska and it is confirmed by the manifest that Congressman McDonald is on board". A Japanese fisherman aboard 58th Chidori Maru later reported to the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency (this report was cited by ICAO analysis) that he had heard a plane at low altitude, but had not seen it. Then he heard "a loud sound followed by a bright flash of light on the horizon, then another dull sound and a less intense flash of light on the horizon" and smelled aviation fuel. Soviet command response to post-detonation flight Though the interceptor pilot reported to ground control, "Target destroyed", the Soviet command, from the general on down, indicated surprise and consternation at KAL 007's continued flight, and ability to regain its altitude and maneuver. This consternation continued through to KAL 007's subsequent level flight at altitude , and then, after almost five minutes, through its spiral descent over Moneron Island. Missile damage to plane The following damage to the aircraft was determined by the ICAO from its analysis of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder: Hydraulics KAL 007 had four redundant hydraulic systems of which systems one, two, and three were damaged or destroyed. There was no evidence of damage to system four. Upon missile detonation, the jumbo jet began to experience oscillations (yawing) as the dual channel yaw damper was damaged. Yawing would not have occurred if hydraulic systems one or two were fully operational. The result is that the control column did not thrust forward after missile detonation (it should have done so as the plane was on autopilot) to bring the plane down to its former altitude of . This failure of the autopilot to correct the rise in altitude indicates that hydraulic system number three, which operates the autopilot actuator, a system controlling the plane's elevators, was damaged or out. KAL 007's airspeed and acceleration rate both began to decrease as the plane began to climb. At twenty seconds after the missile detonation, a click was heard in the cabin, which is identified as the "automatic pilot disconnect warning" sound. Either the pilot or co-pilot had disconnected the autopilot and was manually thrusting the control column forward to bring the plane lower. Though the autopilot had been turned off, manual mode did not begin functioning for another twenty seconds. This failure of the manual system to engage upon command indicates failure in hydraulic systems one and two. With wing flaps up, "control was reduced to the right inboard aileron and the innermost of spoiler section of each side". Engines The co-pilot reported to Captain Chun twice during the flight after the missiles' detonation, "Engines normal, sir." Tail section The first missile was radar-controlled and proximity fuzed, and detonated behind the aircraft. Sending fragments forward, it either severed or unraveled the crossover cable from the left inboard elevator to the right elevator. ==Search and rescue==

As a result of Cold War tensions, the search and rescue operations of the Soviet Union were not coordinated with those of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. Consequently, no information was shared, and each side endeavored to harass or obtain evidence to implicate the other. The flight data recorders were the key pieces of evidence sought by both governments, with the United States insisting that an independent observer from the ICAO be present on one of its search vessels if they were found. International boundaries are not well defined on the open sea, leading to numerous confrontations between the large number of opposing naval ships that were assembled in the area. Soviet search and rescue mission to Moneron Island The Soviets did not acknowledge shooting down the aircraft until September 6, five days after the flight was shot down. Nine years later, the Russian Federation handed over transcripts of Soviet military communications that showed that at least two documented search and rescue (SAR) missions were ordered within a half-hour of the attack, to the last Soviet-verified location of the descending jumbo jet over Moneron Island. The first search was ordered from Smirnykh Air Base in central Sakhalin at 18:47 UTC, nine minutes after KAL 007 had disappeared from Soviet radar screens and brought rescue helicopters from Khomutovo Air Base (the military unit at Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport in southern Sakhalin), and Soviet Border Troops boats to the area. Moneron is just long and wide, located due west of Sakhalin Island at ; it is the only land mass in the whole Tatar Straits. Search for KAL 007 in international waters is deployed from the fleet tug, USNS Narragansett'' (T-ATF 167). Immediately after the shoot-down, South Korea, the owner of the aircraft and therefore prime considerant for jurisdiction, designated the United States and Japan as search and salvage agents, thereby making it illegal for the Soviet Union to salvage the aircraft, providing it was found outside Soviet territorial waters. If it did so, the United States would now be legally entitled to use force against the Soviets, if necessary, to prevent retrieval of any part of the plane. On the same day as the shoot-down, Rear Admiral William A. Cockell, Commander, Task Force 71, and a skeleton staff, taken by helicopter from Japan, embarked in (stationed off Vladivostok at the time) Odarennyy shadows ships of Task Force 71, 7th Fleet as they conduct search operations for Korean Airlines Flight 007. On October 17, Rear Admiral Walter T. Piotti, Jr. took command of the task force and its search and salvage mission from Rear Admiral Cockell. First to be searched was a "high probability" area. This was unsuccessful. On October 21, Task Force 71 extended its search within coordinates encompassing, in an arc around the Soviet territorial boundaries north of Moneron Island, an area of , reaching to the west of Sakhalin Island. This was the "large probability" area. The search areas were outside the Soviet-claimed territorial boundaries. The northwesternmost point of the search touched the Soviet territorial boundary closest to the naval port of Nevelsk on Sakhalin. Nevelsk was from Moneron. This larger search was also unsuccessful. in violation of the 1972 Incidents at Sea agreement, and included false flag and fake light signals, sending an armed boarding party to threaten to board a U.S.-chartered Japanese auxiliary vessel (blocked by U.S. warship interposition), interfering with a helicopter coming off the USS Elliot (Sept. 7), attempted ramming of rigs used by the South Koreans in their quadrant search, hazardous maneuvering of Gavril Sarychev and near-collision with the (September 15, 18), removing U.S. sonars, setting false pingers in deep international waters, sending Backfire bombers armed with air-to-surface nuclear-armed missiles to threaten U.S. naval units, criss-crossing in front of U.S. combatant vessels (October 26), cutting and attempted cutting of moorings of Japanese auxiliary vessels, particularly Kaiko Maru III, and radar lock-ons by a Soviet , Petropavlovsk, and a , Odarennyy, targeting U.S. naval ships and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Douglas Munro (WHEC-724), , escorting , experienced all of the above interference and was involved in a near-collision with Odarennyy (September 23–27). According to the ICAO: "The location of the main wreckage was not determined... the approximate position was , which was in international waters." This point is about from Moneron Island, about from the shore of Sakhalin and from the point of attack. Piotti Jr, commander of Task Force 71 of 7th Fleet, believed the search for KAL 007 in international waters to have been a search in the wrong place and assessed: Had TF [task force] 71 been permitted to search without restriction imposed by claimed territorial waters, the aircraft stood a good chance of having been found. No wreckage of KAL 007 was found. However, the operation established, with a 95% or above confidence level, that the wreckage, or any significant portion of the aircraft, does not lie within the probability area outside the 12 nautical mile area claimed by the Soviets as their territorial limit. At a hearing of the ICAO on September 15, 1983, J. Lynn Helms, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, stated: "The USSR has refused to permit search and rescue units from other countries to enter Soviet territorial waters to search for the remains of KAL 007. Moreover, the Soviet Union has blocked access to the likely crash site and has refused to cooperate with other interested parties, to ensure prompt recovery of all technical equipment, wreckage, and other material." ==Human remains and artifacts==

Surface finds No body parts were recovered by the Soviet search team from the surface of the sea in their territorial waters, though they would later turn over clothes and shoes to a joint U.S.–Japanese delegation at Nevelsk on Sakhalin. On Monday, September 26, 1983, a delegation of seven Japanese and U.S. officials arriving aboard the Japanese patrol boat Tsugaru, had met a six-man Soviet delegation at the port of Nevelsk on Sakhalin Island. KGB Major General A. I. Romanenko, the Commander of the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands frontier guard, headed the Soviet delegation. Romanenko handed over to the U.S. and the Japanese, among other things, single and paired footwear. With footwear that the Japanese also retrieved, the total came to 213 men's, women's, and children's dress shoes, sandals, and sports shoes. The Soviets indicated these items were all that they had retrieved floating or on the shores of Sakhalin and Moneron islands. Family members of KAL 007 passengers later stated that these shoes were worn by their loved ones for the flight. Sonia Munder had no difficulty recognizing the sneakers of her children, one from Christian, age 14, and one from Lisi, age 17, by the intricate way her children laced them. Another mother says, "I recognized them just like that. You see, there are all kinds of inconspicuous marks that strangers do not notice. This is how I recognized them. My daughter loved to wear them." Another mother, Nan Oldham, identified her son John's sneakers from a photo in Life magazine of 55 of the 213 shoes—apparently a random array on display those first days at Chitose Air Force Base in Japan. "We saw photos of his shoes in a magazine," says Oldham, "We followed up through KAL and a few weeks later, a package arrived. His shoes were inside: size 11 sneakers with cream white paint." Nothing was found by the joint U.S.–Japanese–South Korean search and rescue/salvage operations in international waters at the designated crash site or within the search area. Hokkaido finds Eight days after the shoot-down, human remains and other types of objects appeared on the north shore of Hokkaido, Japan. Hokkaido is about below the southern tip of Sakhalin across the La Pérouse Strait (the southern tip of Sakhalin is from Moneron Island which is west of Sakhalin). The ICAO concluded that these bodies, body parts, and objects were carried from Soviet waters to the shores of Hokkaido by the southerly current west of Sakhalin Island. All currents of the Strait of Tartary relevant to Moneron Island flow to the north, except this southerly current between Moneron Island and Sakhalin Island. These human remains, including body parts, tissues, and two partial torsos, totaled 13. All were unidentifiable, but one partial torso was that of a Caucasian woman as indicated by auburn hair on a partial skull, and one partial body was of an Asian child (with glass embedded). There was no luggage recovered. Of the non-human remains that the Japanese recovered were various items including dentures, newspapers, seats, books, eight KAL paper cups, shoes, sandals, sneakers, a camera case, a "please fasten seat belt" sign, an oxygen mask, a handbag, a bottle of dishwashing fluid, several blouses, an identity card belonging to 25-year-old passenger Mary Jane Hendrie of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, and the business cards of passengers Kathy Brown-Spier and Mason Chang. These items generally came from the passenger cabin of the aircraft. None of the items found generally came from the cargo hold of the plane, such as suitcases, packing boxes, industrial machinery, instruments, and sports equipment. Russian diver reports In 1991, after the dissolussion of the Soviet Union, the Russian newspaper Izvestia published a series of interviews with Soviet military personnel who had been involved in salvage operations to find and recover parts of the aircraft. Since no human remains or luggage were found on the surface in the impact area, the divers expected to find the remains of passengers who had been trapped in the submerged wreckage of the aircraft on the seabed. When they visited the site two weeks after the shoot-down, they found that the wreckage was in small pieces, and found no bodies: I had the idea that it would be intact. Well, perhaps a little banged up... The divers would go inside the aircraft and see everything there was to see. It was completely demolished, scattered about like kindling. The largest things we saw were the especially strong braces—they were about one and a half or two meters long and 50–60 centimeters wide. As for the rest—broken into tiny pieces... Tinro ll submersible Captain Mikhail Igorevich Girs' diary: Submergence 10 October. Aircraft pieces, wing spars, pieces of aircraft skin, wiring, and clothing. But—no people. The impression is that all of this has been dragged here by a trawl rather than falling down from the sky... Vyacheslav Popov: "I will confess that we felt great relief when we found out that there were no bodies at the bottom. Not only were no bodies; there were also no suitcases or large bags. I did not miss a single dive. I have quite a clear impression: The aircraft was filled with garbage, but there were really no people there. Why? Usually when an aircraft crashes, even a small one... As a rule, there are suitcases and bags, or at least the handles of the suitcases." Some civilian divers, whose first dive was on September 15, two weeks after the shoot-down, state that Soviet military divers and trawls had been at work before them: Diver Vyacheslav Popov: "As we learned then, before us the trawlers had done some 'work' in the designated quadrant. It is hard to understand what sense the military saw in the trawling operation. First, drag everything haphazardly around the bottom by the trawls, and then send in the submersibles?...It is clear that things should have been done in the reverse order." ICAO also interviewed a number of these divers for its 1993 report: "In addition to the scraps of metal, they observed personal items, such as clothing, documents, and wallets. Although some evidence of human remains was noticed by the divers, they found no bodies." ==Political events==

Initial Soviet denial General Secretary Yuri Andropov, on the advice of Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, but against the advice of the Foreign Ministry, initially decided not to make any admission of downing the airliner, on the premise that no one would find out or be able to prove otherwise. Consequently the TASS news agency reported twelve hours after the shoot-down only that an unidentified aircraft, flying without lights, had been intercepted by Soviet fighters after it violated Soviet airspace over Sakhalin. The aircraft had allegedly failed to respond to warnings and "continued its flight toward the Sea of Japan". was affected by the failing health of Andropov, who was permanently hospitalised in late September or early October 1983 (Andropov died the following February). U.S. reaction and further developments The shoot-down happened at a very tense time in U.S.–Soviet relations during the Cold War. The U.S. adopted a strategy of releasing a substantial amount of hitherto highly classified intelligence information in order to exploit a major propaganda advantage over the Soviet Union. Six hours after the plane was downed, the South Korean government announced that the plane had merely been forced to land abruptly by the Soviets and that all passengers and crew were safe. U.S. secretary of state George P. Shultz held a press conference about the incident at 10:45 on September 1, during which he divulged some details of intercepted Soviet communications and denounced the actions of the Soviet Union. On September 5, 1983, President Reagan condemned the shooting down of the airplane as the "Korean airline massacre", a "crime against humanity [that] must never be forgotten" and an "act of barbarism... [and] inhuman brutality". The following day, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered an audio-visual presentation in the United Nations Security Council, using audio tapes of the Soviet pilots' radio conversations and a map of Flight 007's path in depicting its shooting down. Following this presentation, TASS acknowledged for the first time that the aircraft had indeed been shot down after warnings were ignored. The Soviets challenged many of the facts presented by the U.S. and revealed the previously unknown presence of a USAF RC-135 surveillance aircraft whose path had crossed that of KAL 007. at Wakkanai On September 7, Japan and the United States jointly released a transcript of Soviet communications, intercepted by the listening post at Wakkanai, to an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. Reagan issued a National Security Directive stating that the Soviets were not to be let off the hook, and initiating "a major diplomatic effort to keep international and domestic attention focused on the Soviet action". The move was seen by the Soviet leadership as confirmation of the West's bad intentions. A high-level U.S.–Soviet summit, the first in nearly a year, was scheduled for September 8, 1983, in Madrid. An emergency session of the ICAO was held in Montreal, Canada. On September 12, 1983, the Soviet Union used its veto to block a United Nations resolution condemning it for shooting down the aircraft. In the Cold War context of Operation RYAN, the Strategic Defence Initiative, Pershing II missile deployment in Europe, and the upcoming Exercise Able Archer, the Soviet Government perceived the incident with the South Korean airliner to be a portent of war. Instead, the Soviet Union blamed the CIA for this "criminal, provocative act". In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman issued a comparative study of the KAL 007 event and the 1988 shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by a U.S. warship. Entman stated that in the former case, "the angle taken by the US media emphasised the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation", while in the latter, "the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology". ==Investigations==

NTSB Since the aircraft had departed from U.S. soil and U.S. nationals had died in the incident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was legally required to investigate. On the morning of September 1, the NTSB chief in Alaska, James Michelangelo, received an order from the NTSB in Washington at the behest of the State Department requiring all documents relating to the NTSB investigation to be sent to Washington and notifying him that the State Department would now conduct the investigation. The U.S. State Department, after closing the NTSB investigation on the grounds that it was not an accident, opened an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) investigation. Commentators such as Johnson point out that this action was illegal, and that in deferring the investigation to the ICAO, the Reagan administration effectively precluded any politically or militarily sensitive information from being subpoenaed that might have embarrassed the administration or contradicted its version of events. Unlike the NTSB, ICAO can subpoena neither persons nor documents and is dependent on the governments involved—in this incident, the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and South Korea—to supply evidence voluntarily. Initial ICAO investigation (1983) The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) had only one experience of investigation of an air disaster before the KAL 007 shoot-down. This was the incident of February 21, 1973, when Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 was shot down by Israeli F-4 jets over the Sinai Peninsula. ICAO convention required the state in whose territory the incident had taken place (the Soviet Union) to conduct an investigation together with the country of registration (South Korea), the country whose air traffic control the aircraft was flying under (Japan), as well as the country of the aircraft's manufacturer (US). The ICAO investigation, led by Caj Frostell, did not have the authority to compel the states involved to hand over evidence, instead having to rely on what they voluntarily submitted. Consequently, the investigation did not have access to sensitive evidence such as radar data, intercepts, ATC tapes, or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) (whose discovery the U.S.S.R. had kept secret). A number of simulations were conducted with the assistance of Boeing and Litton (the manufacturer of the navigation system). The ICAO released their report on December 2, 1983, which concluded that the violation of Soviet airspace was accidental. One of two explanations for the aircraft's deviation was that the autopilot had remained in HEADING hold instead of INS mode after departing Anchorage. They postulated that this inflight navigational error was caused by either the crew's failure to select INS mode or the inertial navigation not activating when selected because the aircraft was already too far off track. This statement was subsequently shown to be untrue by Boris Yeltsin's release in 1993 of a November 1983 memo from KGB head Viktor Chebrikov and Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov to Yuri Andropov. This memo stated, "In the third decade of October this year the equipment in question (the recorder of in-flight parameters and the recorder of voice communications by the flight crew with ground air traffic surveillance stations and between themselves) was brought aboard a search vessel and forwarded to Moscow by air for decoding and translation at the Air Force Scientific Research Institute." The Soviet government statement would further be contradicted by Soviet civilian divers who later recalled that they viewed the wreckage of the aircraft on the bottom of the sea for the first time on September 15, two weeks after the plane had been shot down. Following the publication of the report, the ICAO adopted a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for the attack. Furthermore, the report led to a unanimous amendment in May 1984—though not coming into force until October 1, 1998—to the Convention on International Civil Aviation that defined the use of force against civilian airliners in more detail. The amendment to section 3(d) reads in part: "The contracting States recognize that every State must refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight and that, in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered." U.S. Air Force radar data It is customary for the Air Force to impound radar trackings involving possible litigation in cases of aviation accidents. In the civil litigation for damages, the United States Department of Justice explained that the tapes from the Air Force radar installation at King Salmon, United States, pertinent to KAL 007's flight in the Bethel area had been destroyed and could therefore not be supplied to the plaintiffs. At first Justice Department lawyer Jan Van Flatern stated that they were destroyed 15 days after the shoot-down. Later, he said he had "misspoken" and changed the time of destruction to 30 hours after the event. A Pentagon spokesman concurred, saying that the tapes are recycled for re-use from 24–30 hours afterward; the fate of KAL 007 was known inside this timeframe. Glasnost reforms in the same year brought about a relaxation of press censorship; consequently reports started to appear in the Soviet press suggesting that the Soviet military knew the location of the wreckage and possessed the flight recorders. On December 10, 1991, Senator Jesse Helms of the Committee on Foreign Relations, wrote to Boris Yeltsin requesting information concerning the survival of passengers and crew of KAL 007 including the fate of Congressman Larry McDonald. On June 17, 1992, President Yeltsin revealed that after the 1991 failed coup attempt, concerted attempts were made to locate Soviet-era documents relating to KAL 007. He mentioned the discovery of "a memorandum from K.G.B. to the Central Committee of the Communist Party," stating that a tragedy had taken place and adding that there are documents "which would clarify the entire picture." Yeltsin said the memo continued to say that "these documents are so well concealed that it is doubtful that our children will be able to find them." On September 11, 1992, Yeltsin officially acknowledged the existence of the recorders and promised to give the South Korean government a transcript of the flight recorder contents as found in KGB files. In October 1992, Hans Ephraimson-Abt led a delegation of families and U.S. State Department officials to Moscow at the invitation of President Yeltsin. Also handed over at the same time were tapes of the ground-to-air communications of the Soviet military. A 1993 official enquiry by the Russian Federation absolved the Soviet hierarchy of blame, determining that the incident was a case of mistaken identity. On May 28, 1993, the ICAO presented its second report to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Soviet memoranda In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin disclosed five top-secret memos dating from a few weeks after the downing of KAL 007 in 1983. The memos contained Soviet communications (from KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov and Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov to General Secretary Yuri Andropov) that indicated that they knew the location of KAL 007's wreckage while they were simulating a search and harassing the American Navy; they had found the sought-after cockpit voice recorder on October 20, 1983 (50 days after the incident), and chose to keep this knowledge secret because the tapes did not unequivocally support their firmly held view that KAL 007's flight to Soviet territory was a deliberately planned intelligence mission. The third memo acknowledges that analysis of the recorder tapes showed no evidence of the Soviet interceptor attempting to contact KAL 007 via radio nor any indication that the KAL 007 had been given warning shots. However in case the flight recorders shall become available to the western countries their data may be used for Confirmation of no attempt by the intercepting aircraft to establish radio contact with the intruder plane on 121.5 MHz and no tracers warning shots in the last section of the flight That the Soviet search was simulated (while they knew the wreckage lay elsewhere) also is suggested by the article of Mikhail Prozumentshchikov, Deputy Director of the Russian State Archives of Recent History, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the airplane's shoot-down. Commenting on the Soviet and American searches: "Since the U.S.S.R., for natural reasons, knew better where the Boeing had been downed...it was very problematical to retrieve anything, especially as the U.S.S.R. was not particularly interested". Revised ICAO report (1993) On November 18, 1992, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, in a goodwill gesture to South Korea during a visit to Seoul to ratify a new treaty, released both the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of KAL 007. Initial South Korean research showed the FDR to be empty and the CVR to have an unintelligible copy. The Russians then released the recordings to the ICAO secretary general. The ICAO report continued to support the initial assertion that KAL 007 accidentally flew in Soviet airspace, after listening to the flight crew's conversations recorded by the CVR, and confirming that either the aircraft had flown on a constant magnetic heading instead of activating the INS and following its assigned waypoints, or, if it had activated the INS, it had been activated when the aircraft had already deviated beyond the 7-nautical mile Desired Track Envelope within which the waypoints would have been captured. and cockpit voice recorder In addition, the Russian Federation released "Transcript of Communications. U.S.S.R. Air Defence Command Centres on Sakhalin Island" transcripts to ICAO—this new evidence triggered the revised ICAO report in 1993 "The Report of the Completion of the Fact-Finding Investigation", and is appended to it. These transcripts (of two reels of tape, each containing multiple tracks) are time specified, some to the second, of the communications between the various command posts and other military facilities on Sakhalin from the time of the initial orders for the shoot-down and then through the stalking of KAL 007 by Major Osipovich in his Su-15 interceptor, the attack as seen and commented on by General Kornukov, Commander of Sokol Air Base, down the ranks to the Combat Controller Captain Titovnin. The transcripts include the post-attack flight of KAL 007 until it had reached Moneron Island, the descent of KAL 007 over Moneron, the initial Soviet SAR missions to Moneron, the futile search of the support interceptors for KAL 007 on the water, and end with the debriefing of Osipovich on return to base. Some of the communications are the telephone conversations between superior officers and subordinates and involve commands to them, while other communications involve the recorded responses to what was then being viewed on radar tracking KAL 007. These multi-track communications from various command posts telecommunicating at the same minute and seconds as other command posts were communicating provide a "composite" picture of what was taking place. Two expert witnesses testified at a trial before then magistrate judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. They addressed the issue of pre-death pain and suffering. Captain James McIntyre, an experienced Boeing 747 pilot, and aircraft accident investigator, testified that shrapnel from the missile caused rapid decompression of the cabin, but left the passengers sufficient time to don oxygen masks: "McIntyre testified that, based upon his estimate of the extent of damage the aircraft sustained, all passengers survived the initial impact of the shrapnel from the missile explosion. In McIntyre's expert opinion, at least 12 minutes elapsed between the impact of the shrapnel and the crash of the plane, and the passengers remained conscious throughout." ==Alternate theories==

Flight 007 has been the subject of controversy and has spawned a number of alternate theories. Many are based on the suppression of evidence such as the flight data recorders, the untimely destruction of the U.S. Air Force's King Salmon radar data, Cold War disinformation and propaganda and Osipovich's (the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down flight 007) statement that although he knew the plane was a civilian aircraft, he suspected that it could have been used as a spy plane. American historian and professor Alexander Dallin in his 1985 book concluded that the aircraft could not have intruded into the prohibited Soviet airspace inadvertently, yet found no direct evidence suggesting it had intruded deliberately. ==Aftermath==

, Japan Two television movies were produced about the incident; both films were produced before the fall of the Soviet Union allowed access to archives. Shootdown (1988), a telemovie starring Angela Lansbury, John Cullum, and Kyle Secor, was based on the book of the same title by R.W. Johnson, about the efforts of Nan Moore (Lansbury), the mother of a passenger, to get answers from the U.S. and Soviet governments. Then the British Granada Television documentary drama Coded Hostile, screened on ITV on September 7, 1989, detailed the U.S. military and governmental investigation, highlighting the likely confusion of Flight 007 with the USAF RC-135 in the context of routine US SIGINT/COMINT missions in the area. Written by Brian Phelan and directed by David Darlow, it starred Michael Murphy, Michael Moriarty, and Chris Sarandon. An updated version was screened by Channel 4 in the UK on August 31, 1993, incorporating details of the 1992 UN investigation. On September 26, 1983, a nuclear false alarm incident occurred, which almost led to nuclear war. In the aftermath of the airliner shootdown, the Soviet military system was geared to detect a first strike and immediately retaliate, and an optical illusion led the early warning system to malfunction and trigger a false alarm. The FAA temporarily closed Airway R-20, the air corridor that Korean Air Flight 007 was meant to follow, on September 2. Airlines fiercely resisted the closure of this popular route, the shortest of five corridors between the United States and Eastern Asia. It was therefore reopened on October 2 after safety and navigational aids were checked. NATO had decided, under the impetus of the Reagan administration, to deploy Pershing II and Gryphon cruise missiles in West Germany. This deployment would have placed missiles just 6–10 minutes striking distance from Moscow. Support for the deployment was wavering and it looked doubtful that it would be carried out. When the Soviet Union shot down Flight 007, the U.S. was able to galvanize enough support at home and abroad to enable the deployment to go ahead. The unprecedented disclosure of the communications intercepted by the United States and Japan revealed a considerable amount of information about their intelligence systems and capabilities. National Security Agency director Lincoln D. Faurer commented: "...as a result of the Korean Air Lines affair, you have already heard more about my business in the past two weeks than I would desire... For the most part, this has not been a matter of unwelcome leaks. It is the result of a conscious, responsible decision to address an otherwise unbelievable horror." Changes that the Soviets subsequently made to their codes and frequencies reduced the effectiveness of this monitoring by 60%. The U.S. KAL 007 Victims' Association, under the leadership of Hans Ephraimson-Abt, successfully lobbied U.S. Congress and the airline industry to accept an agreement that would ensure future victims of airline incidents would be compensated quickly and fairly by increasing compensation and lowering the burden of proof for airliner misconduct. This legislation has had far-reaching effects for the victims of subsequent aircraft disasters. The U.S. decided to utilize military radars to extend air traffic control radar coverage from out from Anchorage. The FAA also established a secondary radar system (ATCBI-5) on Saint Paul Island. In 1986, the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union set up a joint air traffic control system to monitor aircraft over the North Pacific, thereby giving the Soviet Union formal responsibility to monitor civilian air traffic, and setting up direct communication links between the controllers of the three countries. On September 16, 1983 a White House press secretary read a statement on the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It is announced that the GPS system should be available for civil aviation with the planned completion in 1988. This communication was sometimes understood as the release of the military project for the general public. However, the GPS system was developed from the start for military and civilian navigation. The regular air route between Seoul and Moscow started in April 1990 as the result of the Nordpolitik policy of South Korea, operated by Aeroflot and Korean Air; meanwhile, all 9 of Korean Air's European routes would start passing through Soviet airspace. This was the first time Korean Air aircraft was officially permitted to pass through Soviet airspace. Alvin Snyder, the director of worldwide television for the United States Information Agency, was the producer of the video shown to the U.N. Security Council on September 6, 1983. In an article in The Washington Post on September 1, 1996, he stated that he had been given only limited access to the transcripts of the Soviet communication when he produced the video in 1983. In a March 15, 2001, interview, Valery Kamensky, then Commander of the Soviet Far East Military District Air Defense Force and direct superior to General Kornukov, opined that such a shoot-down of a civilian passenger plane could not happen again in view of the changing political conditions and alliances. In this interview, Kamensky stated, "It is still a mystery what happened to the bodies of the crew and passengers on the plane. According to one theory, right after the detonation of the rocket, the nose and tail section of the jumbo fell off and the mid-fuselage became a sort of wind tunnel so the people were swept through it and scattered over the surface of the ocean. Yet in this case, some of the bodies were to have been found during the search operations in the area. The question of what actually happened to the people has not been given a distinct answer." Two memorials honor the victims of KAL 007. In Cape Sōya, Hokkaido, the Tower of Prayer, a 19.83 structure with 269 white stones, each representing the victims. In Seoul, South Korea, the KAL Memorial Tower, a granite monument at the National Mang-Hyang Cemetery, honors the victims. On September 1, 2003, commenting on the 20th anniversary of the shoot-down article in RIA Novosti, Mikhail Prozumentshchikov, Deputy Director of the Russian State Archives of Recent History, disclosed that the Soviet naval forces in the search for KAL 007 in international waters, already "knew better where [it] had been downed" while conducting their search and that nothing was found "especially as the USSR was not particularly interested." Korean Air still flies from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Seoul. However, the flight no longer stops at Anchorage or flies to Gimpo International Airport as it now flies directly to Incheon International Airport. Flight number 007 has been retired since, using flight numbers for 3 separate flights as 82, 86 and 250. , the separate flights are being served using Boeing 777F for flight 250 as a cargo flight, a Boeing 777-300er for flight 86 and an Airbus A380 for flight 82. Russia shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. At that time, GPS was not yet available for civilian use; it was primarily a military technology. The incident highlighted the need for improved navigation systems, which eventually contributed to the development and deployment of GPS for civilian applications in the following years. GPS Accessibility: Civilian access to the Global Positioning System (GPS) was accelerated, significantly improving navigation for both aviation and maritime operations worldwide. ==In popular culture==

The American science fiction television drama series For All Mankind, referenced the flight in season 2, episode 7, by adding NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine as a passenger on the flight. Characters suggest various explanations for the downing, including the spy plane theory (as the plane was flying over the launch site of Buran in the series), or alternatively positioning him as the root target that led to the downing of the flight, in the show's alternate depiction of how the Space Race could have gone. Lee Greenwood wrote the song "God Bless the USA" in response to his feelings about the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Greenwood stated in the book God Bless the USA (written by himself and Gwen McLin) that the song's lyrics flowed naturally from the music as an honest reflection of his pride to be American. The advertisement was produced by Richard Williams Animation. Angry parents complained to KGO about the poor impression the image of Santa's death made upon young children. The disaster was referenced several times in the 1991 thriller film A Kiss Before Dying. The story of the disaster was featured on the ninth season of Cineflix television show Mayday in the episode entitled "Target Is Destroyed" (S09E05). The shootdown was depicted in the 2024 biographical film Reagan. In 1984, the Italian punk band CCCP - Fedeli alla linea released their first EP, Ortodossia, containing the track "Spara Jurij," related to the KAL007 tragedy. The title (meaning "Yuri, shoot") and lyrics refers to Yuri Andropov, at the time leader of the Soviet Union. First published in 2009, The Zero Option by David Rollins was released, referencing heavily the KAL 007 incident, with the accident being a major plot device during the novel. ==See also==