WHAT HAPPENED TO FLIGHT 007?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650038-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 38
• Publication Date: November 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE APPEAR D
ON PAGE
WASHINGTONIAN
November 1985
What Happened
to Flight 007?
Was the Airliner on an Unlucky Spy Mission or the Victim of Careless
Pilot Error? Probably Neither, Says the Author, a Veteran Pilot. More Likely
It Was an Early Navigation Error Combined with a Last-Minute Short Cut
to Save Fuel. The Result Was the Soviet "Termination" of Flight 007.
By Russell Warren Howe
Ronald Reagan called
it "one of the most
infamous and repre-
hensible acts of histo-
ry"-even a "major turning
point in time." Most Western
pilots refused to fly to Mos-
cow for two months. Andrei
Gromyko was barred from
landing in New York and
New Jersey and missed a UN
session.
A Boeing-747 jumbo jet of
Korean Air Lines had been
blown out of the sky by a Rus-
sian missile. During the fol-
lowing week, 576 pieces of
jetsam, including parts of
bodies, washed ashore around
Wakkanai on Hokkaido, Ja-
pan's northernmost island-
about 200 miles from the
Ocean crash site. Another 167
Pieces of flotsam were recov-
ered from the waves by Japa-
nese, American, and Soviet
ships.
The Soviet Air Force's shoot-down of
Russell Warren Howe flew a Spitfire for the RAF
Si World War H and has been flying ever since. He
Ms been a foreign correspondent for Reuters, the
London Sunday Times, the Washington Post, and
the Baltimore Sun and diplomatic correspondent
for the Washington Times. He lives in Washington,
Where he is finishing his eleventh book, and, for
fun, flies a Piper Cherokee out of Annapolis.
flight KE007 on September 1, 1983, had
killed 269 innocent civilians in the freez-
ing waters off the Siberian coast, leaving
most of the world angry at Moscow-
and also mystified as to how the plane
came to be flying over Sakhalin island in
the first place.
Two years later, the puzzle of why the
airliner was in Soviet airspace remains
officially unsolved. The digi-
tal flight-data recorder in the
tail of the fuselage was never
found-unless it was secretly
found by the Russians. The
same is true of the voice re-
corder from the cockpit.
These are the two "black box-
es"-which are actually
painted orange to make them
more easily recognizable on a
midnight-black seabed or a
desolate mountainside.
Because of the nature of the
Soviet area, the theory that
flight KE007 was on an intel-
ligence mission soon gained
credence and was strenuously
pushed by Moscow. Earlier
that fateful September morn-
ing, the 747 had crossed the
Soviet Union's super-sensi-
tive Kamchatka peninsula-
which, in addition to export-
ing lobster to America, is also
home to Petropavlovsk naval port,
which berths 90 nuclear submarines, in-
cluding about 30 with ballistic missiles
aimed at the US. Kamchatka also con-
tains several air bases and radar stations,
and the missile-test splashdown area of
Plesetsk.
To have flown over Kamchatak was
bad enough; to have gone on to Sakhalin
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was very provocative.
Sakhalin, although no bigger than
Baja California, is host to six military
airfields guarding the Soya Strait-the
30 miles of water between Russia and
Japan that constitute the gate to the open
ocean for the Soviet Pacific Fleet, based
at Vladivostok.
No flyer doubts that the region is sen-
sitive. North Pacific flying charts are
boldly marked AIRCRAFT INFRINGING
UPON NON-FREEFLYING TERRITORY MAY
BE FIRED ON WITHOUT WARNING. AC-
cording to General George J. Keegan
Jr., the former director of Air Force
intelligence, six Soviet colonels and
lieutenant-colonels have been executed,
over the years, for failing to destroy
intruding American planes.
Moreover, that night Soviet defenses
had already counted five flights by US
intelligence planes waiting for the
launch toward Plesetsk of an experimen-
tal Soviet SS-X-24 intercontinental bal-
listic missile-a launch that some theo-
rized might be a breach of the SALT II
agreement. None of the five spy-plane
flights had infringed Soviet airspace, but
they came close. Was KE007 taking ad-
vantage of its civilian status to spy inside
Soviet territory? Was it being used to
trigger Soviet defenses, so that a Ferret-
D satellite overhead could film the re-
sults? This led to the most fundamental
question of all: Was the flight off course
intentionally?
The Korean Air Lines 747 had arrived
at Anchorage from New York around
3 AM Alaska daylight time. There was
a routine crew change, refueling, and
servicing. The Soviets claimed that
takeoff was delayed 40 minutes so that
the jumbo could rendezvous with an
American RC-135 spyplane monitoring
the missile test. In fact, KE007 took
off one minute early, at 4:59 local time,
10 PM in Seoul, just right to put the
Plane into Seoul's Kimpo airport around
6 AM, when Korean customs and immi-
gration clerks come to work.
The captain, Chun Byung-in, 45, was
a meticulous and competent man. He
had been with KAL for eleven years,
after ten years in the air force, which he
had left with the rank of major. A Pres-
byterian with a degree in economics,
he had flown 10,627 hours, including
6,618 in 747s and five years flying in
and out of Anchorage. Described by his
employers as a "model pilot," and the
recipient of a citation the year before for
ten years of accident-free performance,
he had occasionally flown his namesake,
South Korea's President Chun Du-
hwan, on official overseas visits.
The first officer was Sohn Dong-hui,
47, who had joined KAL in 1979 after
seventeen years in the air force, where
he attained the rank of lieutenant colo-
nel. He had flown 8,917 hours, includ-
ing 3,411 in 747s and 52 previous North
Pacific flights.
The flight engineer, Kim Eui-dong,
was a graduate of the Korean Aviation
College and was one of the new genera-
tion of pilots not trained in the military.
In six years with KAL, he had acquired
4,012 hours, including 2,614 on 747s.
The cockpit crew was as technically
competent and experienced as any pas-
senger could wish.
Also on board were a purser, three
stewards, thirteen stewardesses, three
armed anti-hijack sky marshals (the cap-
tain also carried a side-arm), and six
pilots deadheading back from Alaska,
for a total of 29 KAL employees.
Some of the 240 passengers could
spread themselves over the 168 empty
seats for the long night flight. In first
class, along with the six deadheading
pilots, the only paying passenger was
Congressman Larry P. McDonald of
Georgia, president of the John Birch So-
ciety, who was on his way to attend the
30th anniversary of the signing of the
US-South Korea mutual-defense treaty.
KE007 was routed to fly R (for red) 20,
one of four parallel routings from An-
chorage to the Daigo navigational bea-
con in Japan, where the plane would turn
right and cross the last stretch of ocean
of its final leg into Seoul. R20 is the
closest of the routes to Soviet airspace.
Aircraft join R20 at Bethel, about an
hour west of Anchorage, and are soon
beyond the reach of all American civil-
ian radars. For 900 nautical miles, or
about 100 minutes of flying, airliners are
on their own, except for radio communi-
cation, until they are picked up again by
Japanese radars. For this period, they
are closely tracked only by Soviet con-
trollers and invariably rely on inertial
navigation systems, or INS. An INS is a
computerized system of gyroscopes and
other instruments that tells the crew pre-
cisely where the plane is, its altitude,
speed, and other data. The INS is cou-
pled to the autopilot, steering the plane
along the chosen track.
Normally, an aircraft "tracks out" of
Anchorage by steering the reverse of the
Bethel-Anchorage track. But that night
the Anchorage VOR navigational bea-
con was "down" for routine mainte-
nance. In that situation, the pilot is sup-
posed to track into Bethel on a pre-
scribed magnetic compass heading, and
then switch to INS.
From the start, this seems to have been
an ill-fated flight. When First Officer
Sohn radioed Anchorage that KE007
was over Bethel, the plane, according to
its blip on the radar screen at King Salm-
on US Air Force Station, was actually
twelve nautical miles north of the beacon
and already on the fatal course that
would take it into Russia. The Air Force
did nothing about it; it had no responsi-
bility for civilian planes. Between Bethel
and Daigo are seven ocean way sta-
tions-points of latitude and longitude
along route R20. Four of them are com-
pulsory reporting points. All seven posi-
tions are programmed into the inertial
navigation computer. As each waypoint
approaches, two amber lights come on
beside the pilots' INS panel; they go off
as the plane passes over, or abeam (be-
side), the points. The first officer then
radios Anchorage or Tokyo control with
the flight's position.
Captain Chun's plane had radio prob-
lems. The incoming crew had reported
that one of the three VHF (very high
frequency) radios was "noisy." It was
repaired at Anchorage and worked on
the ground, but in the air it failed again.
The other VHFs were also faulty. For
KE007's communications with Anchor-
age, another KAL flight-KE015, head-
ing for Seoul via Los Angeles-had to
intervene and retransmit the exchange.
In the airline world, such snafus are not
unusual. Eventually, KE007 went onto
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HF (high frequency) radio transmission.
Retracing KE007's odyssey from US
Air Force and Soviet tapes, one can
clearly see that the plane flew progres.
sively farther off course as it made its
way past the Nabie, Nukks, Neeva, Nin.
no, and Nippi waypoints. At Neeva,
KE007 was 150 miles off track. That's
where Soviet radar first picked it up,
its track confused for a while with that
of a US Air Force RC-135 from Shem-
ya, in the Aleutians, which the Russian
controllers had noticed on their screens
earlier.
By Nippi, it was 185 miles off course.
But still KE007's crew didn't know it,
because the lights come on as long as the
airplane is within 200 miles of the way.
point. At 1709 Greenwich mean time
(GMT), Sohn apparently saw his amber
lights go off and radioed Tokyo: "Over.
head Nippi one seven zero seven Zulu,
level three three zero, fuel one three
two, temperature minus four niner, wind
three two zero at four five knots, esti-
mating Nokka one eight two six Zulu."
In English, this means that Sohn was
claiming that the flight had crossed the
Nippi waypoint just before, at 1707
GMT (when it was actually 185 miles to
the north and close to Petropavlovsk in
Kamchatka); that it was at 33,000 feet,
with 132,000 pounds of fuel remaining,
an outside temperature of minus 49 de-
grees Celsius, and a 45-knot wind com-
ing from 320 degrees (approximately
northwest). Sohn was also reporting that
KE007 expected to be at Nokka by 1826
GMT. Tokyo ground controllers took
Sohn's word for it; they had no way
of knowing that the plane was off
course.
More than an hour later, Sohn waited
for the amber lights to signal that Nokka
was coming up. But KE007 was now far
more than 200 miles off course, so this
signal never came. Flight KE007 was
365 miles off course when the Soviet Air
Force "terminated" it.
When the errant plane had first flown
toward Kamchatka, Soviet controllers,
believing it to be a RC-135, assumed that
it would turn tail just before entering
Soviet airspace. When it flew straight
across the peninsula, fighters scram-
bled. But at 33,000 feet and 520 knots,
KE007 was safely in international space
over the Sea of Okhotsk by the time
fighters got close.
When the plane continued on a
straight course, Soviet defenses were
waiting for it. By the time it reached
Sakhalin, three Sukhoi-15 interceptors
were in the air. At 1812 GMT, while
Sohn was waiting for the amber lights to
signal the threshold of Nokka waypomG
one Soviet pilot, overheard by the Jape
nese, was telling his ground control:
have visual contact. "
Around this time, Japan's Air Self
Defense Force Radar picked up a blip of
0007 passing over Sakhalin at a point
about 45 miles north of their screens at
Wakkartai. The Wakkanai controllers
assumed that it was a Russian plane.
Now only a few minutes remained for all
the mistakes to be made and to come
together in one terrible finale in the pre-
dawn of a Siberian night.
There was a half moon. On board the
747, the dinner and film were long over,
and most of the passengers were dozing
behind closed porthole blinds. The pas-
tel-yellow panel lights on the flight deck
i were not visible from the outside, but the
aircraft's wingtip navigation lights were
on and the red anti-collision beacon on
the fuselage was rotating.
A Soviet pilot said at 1821 GMT:
"The target is at 10,000 meters (32,500
feet), flying 240 degrees. "
From here on, the only recordings
available are of one Soviet pilot, identi-
fied to this reporter by intelligence
sources as Major Vasiliy Konstantinov-
ich Kazmin, responding to his ground
I controller. The ground controller's com-
ments were not recorded.
First, Kazmin complained that "the
target is not responding," implying that
he had tried to contact the airliner on the
international emergency frequency, to
which one of the 747's VHF radios
should have been tuned. But these, we
know, were not working well.
Then Kazmin snapped: "Locked
on," meaning that the Su-15's two AA-2
missiles, which have the NATO code
name Anab, had been targeted to the
exhausts of the airliner's engines.
Then, in response to some instruction,
the Russian major said: "Broken off
lock-on. Firing cannon bursts"-pre-
sumably a warning measure, using trac-
ers, suggested by the ground controller.
Chun, Sohn, and Kim, their heads
down in the cockpit, apparently saw
nothing, at least at first; and since Kaz-
min apparently fired his tracers from
behind and below the 747, instead of
alongside, there is little chance they
could have seen them.
A minute before, shortly after 1820
GMT, KE007 had requested an altitude
"step" from 33,000 to 35,000 feet; the
craft could fly more economically at a
higher elevation. Tokyo authorized the
climb, which slowed the aircraft's
speed. Major Kazmin's own speed re-
mained constant, and recordings show
that he unintentionally overtook his tar-
get. This situation offered him the best
Opportunity to carry out the international
requirements for making an intruding
plane follow an air-force escort to the
ground-moving in front and to the left,
where the civilian pilot can see the es-
cort, and waggling the fighter's wings. k
Instead, Kazmin was soon saying:
"Now I have to fall back a bit.... Say,
again? ... I am dropping back.... Now
I will try rockets." Was he deliberately
staying out of the airliner's sight, thirst.
ing for a kill? The evidence grimly raises
that suspicion.
At 1825 and eleven seconds, the Sovi-
et pilot said: "Understood. I am locked
on. Target is at eight kilometers. "
Five seconds later, he said: "I am
closing on the target. I have already
switched on." A few kilometers away,
copilot Sohn must still have been won-
dering why the lights announcing Nokka
had not yet lit up.
There is no indication the
crew knew they had been
hit by a missile, only that
all four engines were out.
At 1826 GMT-Sohn's estimated
time for passing Nokka-Kazmin told
his ground control: "I have executed the
launch.... Target destroyed. "
At 1827, Sohn was talking to Tokyo.
The message was garbled, and Tokyo
tried to call the plane on two other fre-
quencies. What is preserved is: "Rapid
decompression. . . . All engines... .
Rapid decompression.... One zero one
two delta.... " There is no indication
that the crew knew their plane had been
hit by a missile-only that all four en-
gines were out and that there was a loss
of cabin pressure caused by the entry of
outside air. "Delta" is thought to refer
not to the letter D, but to the finally
noticed presence of the Soviet Sukhois-
planes with delta wings.
In the waters between Sakhalin and
Moneron Island, the 99-ton Japanese
squid trawler Chidori Maru 58 heard an
explosion above. The blip of the KE007
took three minutes to go off the Wakka-
nai screens, indicating that the pilots
wrestled with the plane before it finally
dived into the water.
All that day, and for days afterward,
the western world erupted in anger.
The Kremlin did not help by a series
of contradictions and evasions. The
Soviet pilots who had intercepted the
747 gave the lie to their own govern-
ment's claim that the airliner was not
showing lights, that visibility was
difficult, and so on. Marshal Nikolai
Ogarkov, the Soviet chief of staff, made
the improbable claim that the order to
shoot down the plane had been given by
a "local commander," with Moscow
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only being "informed later."
Actually, according to intelligence
sources, the order probably was given
eral Vladimir bymartder of Soviet Far East Forces, at the
request of colonel-General Semyon Ro-
eunov, chief of staff of the Air Defense
forces. Romanov had had to put off the
SS.X-24 test because of the foreign in-
trusion into Soviet airspace, and was
probably not in the best of late-night
moods.
Initially, the Soviet pilots probably
did mistake the 747 for an RC-135, a
military version of the Boeing 707.
Viewed from behind and below-the
normal attack position-the raised flight
dock and lounge of the 747 would not be
visible; the similar designs of the two
Boeing planes would be indistinguisha-
ble in perspective, especially at night.
But Major Kazmin eventually flew
alongside and in front of KE007 before
shooting it down, and by then had re-
ported the flashing lights of a civilian
passenger plane.
Using an "intelligence" pretext to
shoot down airliners is not new. In 1951,
a Constellation of Israel's El Al, flying
over Bulgaria on its way from Vienna to
Tel Aviv, was mistaken for a US mili-
tary Constellation, fired on, and forced
to land. In 1971, Israel itself earned
global opprobrium by shooting down a
Libyan airliner that had crossed the Suez
Canal in a sandstorm on its approach to
Cairo. It was over Egyptian territory
occupied at the time by Israeli forces.
All but thirteen aboard died, including
the French captain.
In April 1978, KAL flight KE902 was
fired on and forced to land on a frozen
lake near Murmansk after losing its way
on a flight from Paris. It was 200 miles
inside the Soviet Union. Two passengers
were killed by the Russian bullets.
Because of the 1951 confusion be-
tween a spy plane and an airliner, and the
mendacious Israeli and Soviet claims to
the same confusion in 1971 and 1978,
many Americans and others were tempt-
ed to accept the Moscow story that
KE007 was on a spying mission. More
Machiavellian theorists postulated that
the aircraft was genuinely lost, but that
the US Air Force had let it fly into Soviet
airspace without warning it, in order to
get a picture of Soviet reactions and
countermeasures. The International Civ-
il Aviation Organization referred all the
theories for the plane's invasion of Sovi-
et space to its Air Navigation Commis-
Sion, which rejected the intelligence-
mission explanation as fanciful. Even
beyond the technical evidence, the no-
tion that an airliner with two or three
hundred civilians aboard had been in-
tentionally used as a decoy for Soviet de-
fenses never had much merit in the first
place, except for the sort of people who
believe that John F. Kennedy was shot
by the freemasons. An RCV (remotely
controlled vehicle, or pilotless plane)
would be much more efficient than a
747. These tiny craft are hard to hit and
cheap enough to be expendable, while
still capable of triggering defenses.
The Air Navigation Commission
found no evidence that either Tokyo
control or the plane's crew had been
aware of any deviation from course, al-
though it pointed out that the crew
The Soviet Union deserved
condemnation for its
murderous overreaction.
But KE007 was
trespassing. Why?
should have followed "company proce-
dures" to verify whether it was on track.
The airliner, the commission said, had
no excuse for being lost except "a con-
siderable degree of lack of alertness and
attentiveness on the part of the entire
flight crew, but not to a degree that is
unknown in international civil avia-
tion." The commission scored the use of
force against the plane and Moscow's
refusal to accept an international investi-
gation team.
Obviously, the Soviet Union deserved
condemnation for its murderous over-
reaction, and for its subsequent obfusca-
tions. But KE007 was trespassing. Why?
Summing up, the Air Navigation
Commisssion discounted "unlawful in-
terference [i.e., hijacking], crew inca-
pacitation, deliberate crew action asso-
ciated with fuel-saving incentives, or
extensive cockpit avionics/navigation
systems failures or malfunctioning."
It is on the third point that the report
probably goes wrong. "Deliberate ...
action associated with fuel-saving"
means short-cutting to earn Korean Air
Lines bonuses for using less fuel than a
flight normally required.
Former KAL pilots are reluctant to
impugn the professional honor of Cap-
tain Chun and their other dead comrades
on the flight, and they will only speak if
they are not identified. Most, being pen-
sioners of the airline, are afraid to speak
at all; but those who agreed to talk to
me were all agreed that short-cutting to
win the company's fuel-saving bonus
was customary, in pre-Sakhalin days,
and that it was normally a risk-free
enterprise.
The pilots say that when program-
ming the INS computer, standard proce-
dure was to replace the last reporting
point-Daigo-by the Seoul coordi-
nates, reporting "overhead Daigo"
while they were actually far north of the
Daigo beacon, cutting straight across
Hokkaido and the Sea of Japan to the
Korean coast, saving thousands of
pounds of fuel on the four big engines,
and earning hundreds of dollars each in
bonus money for the three pilots.
Both KAL and the Air Navigation Com-
mission dismiss the short-cutting theory.
They conclude that short-cutting would
have been noticed, either on radar at the
time or by examining other technical
data afterwards. But all the reasons for
rejecting the short-cutting theory pre-
suppose that short-cutting would take
place all along the route. In fact, as the
retired KAL pilots told me, the usual
practice was to cut short only the final
leg. (See map on page 149.)
But why was KE007 so far off course
for so long-a remarkable five hours and
26 minutes before being shot down?
Many analysts, including the best local
reporter on the issue, Michael Westlake,
managing editor of the Far East Eco-
nomic Review in Hong Kong, lean to-
ward the so-called "heading mode"
theory, one of two possibilities cited by
the Air Navigation Commission.
This theory assumes that, by leaving a
switch in the wrong position, the pilots
flew all night the heading they had set
themselves to go from Anchorage to
Bethel ("heading mode") instead of the
one determined by the inertial naviga-
tions computer ("INS mode") to follow
route R20.
The commission's report says: "In
such a situation, with the INS system
activated, although not controlling flight
navigation, the crew would have been
provided with regular indications of
flight navigation waypoint passages at or
near the flight-plan estimates for such
passages and would therefore have been
under the impression that they were nav-
igating in the INS mode." The second
possible explanation, said the Commis-
sion, was that someone got one digit
wrong when programming the INS com-
puter, putting Anchorage ten degrees of
longitude-600 nautical miles-east of
where it really is. Such an error would
have thrown KE007 badly off course on
its first leg, but not thereafter.
The crew presumably thought, in its last
moments, that it was off Hokkaido, be-
cause it had set its transponders at
1300-a distance-measuring frequency
used in Japanese airspace. And they pre-
sumably thought that they were in "INS
mode," not "heading." And perhaps
they were.
The possibility that the navigating
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system was on "INS," and neither mal-
functioning nor functioning as the pilots
expected it to do, and that no punching
error was made during the program-
ming, seems to have been overlooked
except by other KAL pilots, with whom I
talked. If we go to the manual for the
Litton LTN-72R INS, we learn that this
scientific marvel "can be aligned [on
geographical coordinates] only when
stationary on the ground. " (Emphasis
added.)
As the manual warns, if Sohn or Kim
"I have never failed to be
surprised at how careless
the Koreans were. They
continued to fly too close to
Soviet airspace."
or 'sun himself was still aligning the
n. tional INS after the 747 began to
to Anchorage-that is, if the aircraft
beg. to move before the feeding of
coot inates was completed and the
switch finally turned to "INS"-this
would, in the manual's words, "make
the output of the system unpredictable. "
Inserting destination coordinates as
the final "way station" while the plane
was moving would probably, the manual
says, make the navigation system bypass
the other waypoint coordinates and
"track" directly to destination-in this
case, Seoul, using the direct route that
trespasses Soviet airspace.
This would explain why the aircraft
went off course to the north from the
start, moving progressively away from
it, ick and keeping its nose pointed
,essly, like a homing pigeon, to-
Seoul. The crew, however, would
h. believed they were safely on track,
and would have realized that something
was wrong only when the amber lights
announcing the Nokka checkpoint did
not appear. By then, with Major Kazmin
flying underneath their tail, it was too
late to do anything about it.
Says a leading American businessman in
Seoul: "I don't think anyone here doubt-
ed, from the start, that short-cutting to
earn the fuel bonus was the explana-
tion. " Said General Keegan, the former
USAF intelligence chief, at the time:
"I have never failed to be surprised at
how careless the Koreans are. Despite
the risk of flying near Soviet airspace,
the Koreans continued to fly too close-
They continued to bruise the Soviets on
this. What happened [at Sakhalin] they
invited."
That's going too far. If all had goa
well, KE007 would simply have flown
across Hokkaido instead of Honshu, and
would have come a little close to North
Korea in the final minutes.
That KE007 was off course uninten-
tionally because it intended to be off
course later-with the short cut-cannot
be proved. But that explanation alone
seems to fit the evidence.
The airline, even if not plagued by
lawsuits, would prefer a mechanical er-
ror for which the computer manufactur-
er could be blamed. The next best would
be "innocent" pilot error. Any error
based on a questionable intention-in
this case, short-cutting, to earn the air-
line's fuel-saving bonus-is unaccepta-
ble, and the company is all but silent on
the subject.
The Sakhalin tragedy of September 1983
was followed by the crash of a Korean
DC-10 freight plane at Anchorage in
December, injuring seven. The follow-
ing month, January 1984, a KAL plane
skidded off an icy runway at Seoul Air-
port; no one was injured.
Shortly after all these mishaps, KAL
took a number of steps that were almost
surely related to Sakhalin: First, it quiet-
ly abolished the fuel-saving bonus that
for years had been an inducement to
short-cutting; then, to reduce the risk-
taking associated with ex-military pilots,
fourteen of these were discreetly forced
to resign. All remaining flight crews
went through a retraining process.
Cho Chung-kon (known as Charlie
Cho), who was 51 at the time, took over
as president of the company from his 64-
year-old brother, Cho Chung-hun
(known as Harry Cho), who became
chairman. Several top cadres were re-
shuffled. Korean Air Lines changed its
name to Korean Air, and the planes got a
new livery. Flight 007 had already be-
come flight 017.
The airline is still in search of its
reputation. Seasoned globetrotters
would agree that it is not in the same
class as Singapore Air, Japan Air, Thai
International, or Air India. But it is the
world's tenth largest (and sixth among
freight carriers), with 38 planes and
more than 2,000 flight-deck and cabin
staff, and its service reputation, while
not at top Asian standards, is probably
better than that of any American airline.
Although the airline's record on safety is
probably as good as that of any one of its
size with such extensive routes, it is now
anxious to establish a record for caution.
The tragedy at Sakhalin has produced
some good. It has forced the US Air
Force to cooperate on the Pacific route.
At Shemya, American civilian and air-
force controllers now work together.
Because the northern edge of R20-the
track from Anchorage to Seoul that
KE007 supposedly was flying-comes
within eleven miles of Soviet airspace,
all cases of aircraft flying more than
eleven miles off course are now reported
to the pilots. Since November 1983,
there have been 38 such incidents, in-
cluding two planes that were more than
25 miles off course. Since December 18,
1984, there has also been an exit radar
on St. Paul's Island, to help airliners
"track out" from Alaska.
Korean Air, Litton Industries, and the
US government are being sued in Wash-
ington and Tokyo; one issue is whether
the federal government "has a legal duty
to warn or advise civilian aircraft [that
are] off course." At Korean Air's re-
quest, the US District Court in Washing-
ton has ordered the Federal Aviation Ad-
minstration not to answer press
questions, and Korean Air has given its
employees a choice between silence and
unemployment.
Lloyds has paid Korean Air $35 mil-
lion as "hull insurance" on the lost
plane.
The airline carried $400 million of
insurance with Lloyd's; claims brought
by the kin of victims total about $2.3
billion. Korean Air has normally refused
to pay more than $75,000 per victim; it
has, however, paid 80 million won
(about $100,000 at the time) to a Korean
legislator whose daughter perished in the
crash.
Those who may have known for sure
what happened are scattered along the
deep floor of the North Pacific. Two of
the victims, deputy purser Kim Yak-kun
and flight attendant Suh Jong-suk, were
engaged, and were married posthumous-
ly by their families. One of his suits and
her traditional han-bok dress were bur-
ied together. Another stewardess on the
flight, Cho Hyong-sim, also was mar-
ried posthumously to her fiance, Kim
Bon-chon, who was a passenger on
KE007.
Captain Chun's widow, Kim Ok-hi,
never accepted the easy explanation of
pilot error, advanced by the airline and
the Air Navigation Commission. I think
that she was right. The man whom she
remembers as insisting that everything
in the house be in the right place was not
incapable of a mistake, she says, but he
would not have left a switch in the wrong
place for six hours, especially with two
other pilots to help him.
She says his son, now ten, plans to be
a pilot. What better way could his fa-
ther's ghost be put to rest? Like all pilots
of our generation, Chun was familiar
with "unforgiving" planes-the ones
that must be flown strictly according to
the book. Now we would seem to have a
new problem-unforgiving navigation
computers. ^
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650038-7