"I Told the World the Soviets Shot It Down in Cold Blood, But I Was Wrong..."

(Please read the rest of the article written by:
Alvin A. Snyder
Sunday, September 1 1996, The Washington Post)

Look here to see:
(click --->)the entire article. Very interesting stuff, please read this!
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So TRAGIC!

This all happened on the 1st of September in 1983:

The Boeing arrived at Anchorage at 3:30AM (local time) after a flight from New York. At 5AM the aircraft took off again, bound for Seoul.

On board were 23 crew and 246 passengers.

The Aircraft strayed inadvertently over Soviet territory a couple of times. At that time the "cold war" was on, therefore they were suspicious about exactly what this plane was up to. Apparently the Kamchatka Peninsula is a very sensitive area, so they were understandably freaked a bit.

Fighter planes sent up had at first "tried" to contact the pilot of KAL 007 by radio and by making visual contact. When this failed, the pilot of the lead fighter plane reported firing 120 rounds of ammunition in four 30-round bursts from his cannon. The lack of tracers made them INVISIBLE to the 747, (which of course continued) on its course.

There was an order to shoot down the KAL 007 as it was about to leave Soviet airspace (for the second time) after flying over Sakhalin Island. It was definitely shot in international airspace. The lead aircraft of the two fighter planes

Su-15 Flagon interceptors



came from Dolinsk-Sokol airbase fired around 18:26 GMT, and shot down KAL 007.

The airliner crashed into the sea north of Moneron Island, killing ALL on board.

The reports that the airliner had been forced to land on Sakhalin were soon proved FALSE (despite all of the conspiracy theorists reports). But there are still many questions about that.

Transcripts recovered from the airliner's cockpit voice recorder (in the black box) indicate that the crew were completely UNAWARE that they were off course and violating Soviet airspace (at the end they were at least 500 kilometers west of the planned track, no GPS in those days)! Just before being attacked, the 747 had been at an altitude of around 35,000 feet.

When that missile exploded, KAL 007's tail was pushed down (the black box indicated this) which at the same time lifted its nose causing an altitude gain before it began to descend from 18:26 until recording ceased at 18:27:46. (see the details in the next section) Capt. Chun was able to turn off the autopilot and it is unknown whether he was able to regain any measure of control as the aircraft spiraled toward the ocean around 5 miles (8 km) below after the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder stopped functioning. But it seems that it took a long time to crash, I would suspect that the pilot did in fact regain some controls. What a freaking nightmare. That's too long a time to contemplate your inevitable fate. Worse than any horror movie.

The International Civil Aviation Organization investigated the incident and they concluded that the violation of Soviet airspace was ACCIDENTAL: The autopilot had been set to "heading hold" after departing Anchorage. It was determined that the crew did NOT notice this error or subsequently perform navigational checks that would have revealed that the aircraft was diverging further and further from it's assigned and normal route. This was later deemed to be caused by a "lack of situational awareness and flight deck coordination". (see wikipedia explanation)

According to a U.S. Department of State transcript of the shoot down reported by the New York Times, the pilot who shot the plane, Gennady Osipovich (his photo is below), stated that he fired multiple bursts from his cannon prior to releasing the two missiles. The pilot admitted there were no tracers, and these shots could NOT have been seen by the KAL 007 crew. The Soviets officially maintained that they had attempted radio contact with the airliner and that KAL 007 failed to reply. No other aircraft or ground monitors covering those emergency frequencies at the time reported hearing any such Soviet radio calls. That is because those calls NEVER HAPPENED! The Soviet pilot reported that KAL 007 was flashing navigation lights, which should have suggested that the plane was CIVILIAN. In 1996, Osipovich indicated that he KNEW KAL 007 was a Boeing: "I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant NOTHING. His excuse ---> "It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use." The United States used RC-135s to spy on Russia, and, according to Osipovich, he feared that the plane could have been an RC-135.

World Reaction

US President Ronald Reagan condemned the shoot down, calling it the "Korean airline massacre," a "crime against humanity that must never be forgotten" and an "act of barbarism and inhuman brutality."
"And make no mistake about it; this attack was not just against ourselves or the Republic of Korea. This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations. They deny the deed, but in their conflicting and misleading protestations, the Soviets reveal that, yes, shooting down a plane-even one with hundreds of innocent men, women, children, and babies is a part of their normal procedure if that plane is in what they claim as their airspace."

The next day, the Soviet Union finally admitted to shooting down KAL 007,

stating the pilots did not know it was a civilian aircraft when it violated Soviet airspace. The attack of course pushed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to a new low. On September 15, President Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to revoke the license of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines to operate flights into and out of the United States. As a result, Aeroflot flights to North America were only available through cities in Canada or Mexico. Aeroflot service to the United States was not restored until April 29, 1986.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, commissioned an audio-visual presentation in the Security Council using tapes of the Soviet radio conversations and a map of the plane's flight path to depict the shoot-down as savage and unjustified. Alvin A. Snyder, producer of the video, later revealed in a September 1, 1996 article in the Washington Post (see article at the beginning of this page) that he was given only selected portions of the tape of the Soviet military conversation that led to the downing of the aircraft. Unedited versions of the tape later revealed to Snyder that the Soviets had in fact given the plane internationally recognized warning signals.

Airway R-20,(the flight path that Korean Air Flight 007 was supposed to fly), which came within 17 miles of Soviet airspace at its closest point, was closed after the accident on September 2. This reflected shock, and the need to reassure the public. However, pilots and airlines fiercely resisted and the route was reopened on October 2. More significantly, the US decided to utilize military radars, extending the radar coverage from Anchorage from 200 to 1200 miles. These radars had been used in 1968 to alert Seaboard World Airlines Flight 253 in a similar situation. R. W. Johnson writes in his 1986 book Shootdown: "The question of why these radars were not used to alert 007 remains." As a result of this incident, Ronald Reagan announced that the Global Positioning System
(click --->)GPS. would be made available for civilian uses once completed.

(full credit to WIKIPEDIA for most of this information)

This

is the guy who pulled the "trigger".


Ex-Soviet Pilot Still Insists KAL 007 Was Spying

Colonel Osipovich has no Regrets
(Photo credit: James Hill for The New York Times)
December 9, 1996

Look here to see:
(click --->)Details about the disaster flight 007.



Look here to see:
(click --->)the TRANSCRIPT of COCKPIT CONVERSATIONS (during the disaster).

Look here to see:
(click --->)KAL 007 PASSENGER LIST.