Source: Mantou Say
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September 1, 1983, Seoul time at 3:23 am.
Deputy Captain Sun Donghui sent a request to Tokyo Ground Aviation Traffic Center to change the altitude:
"This is Flight KAL 007, we request to climb to 350 altitude."
Soon, he received an approval reply from the Aviation Traffic Center:
"Flight KAL 007, after climbing to 350, maintain the altitude."
Then, Captain Qian Bingyin pushed the push rod and the plane began to climb to a height of 35,000 feet - generally speaking, the higher the flight altitude, the more fuel it can be.
According to the flight plan, the plane carrying 240 passengers and 29 crew members will arrive at Seoul (now Seoul) Gimpo Airport in 3 hours to end the journey.
But at this moment, the plane suddenly vibrated violently, and after the fuselage rose, it began to lose control.
minutes later, on the radar screen of the Tokyo Air Traffic Center, the point represented by this Korean Air flight abbreviated as KAL 007 disappeared.
In fact, at that moment, Flight KAL 007 disappeared on all the radars in the world that could monitor its whereabouts.
And, it has never been discovered again.
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Time goes back one day.
August 31, Seoul time at 1:05 pm.
A Boeing 747-203B aircraft taxied and accelerated on the Kennedy Airport runway in New York, USA, and then took off into the air and flew towards the blue sky.
This aircraft is Korean Air Flight KAL 007.
Korean Air Flight 007, with the registration number of the fuselage HL7442, is the 186th 747 manufactured by Boeing . It was shipped and delivered to German Condor Airways in March 1972. It was transferred to Korean Air in February 1979. It uses the Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7A engine
, and the captain of this flight, Chien Byung-in, who was 45 years old, has 10,625 hours of flight time. He previously served in the South Korean Air Force for 10 years and was elected as the reserve pilot for President Jon Doo-hwan's special plane three times. His colleagues' evaluation of him was "well-organized" and "very careful", and he was even joked as "human computer".
According to the flight plan, Flight KAL 007 will land at Anchorage in Alaska at 8:30 pm Seoul time. After refueling and resting, then fly to Seoul.
At 10 pm, after a 40-minute delay, Flight KAL 007 took off again and flew to Seoul.
When the plane entered a level flight, the two pilots actually didn’t have much to do. They started chatting easily, discussing today’s breakfast, discussing currency exchange at the destination airport, and even starting chatting with another Korean Air flight KAL 015 pilot behind them.
KAL Flight 015 and KAL 007 fly the same route, but the flight locations of the two aircraft are 15 minutes.
In the chat, the pilot of KAL 015 talked about a strange thing:
"We suddenly encountered a strong wind."
KAL Sun Donghui, the deputy captain of 007, asked:
"How strong is it?"
The other party answered:
"The speed is 35 knots per hour, blowing from the direction of 040."
Hearing this sentence, Sun Donghui and the captain Qian Bingyin were silent for a moment, and then Sun Donghui replied:
"We are blowing a 15-chair headwind here."
The reason why the two people were silent was actually very simple: how could one of the two planes with a distance of only 15 minutes apart and on the same route encounter a headwind? The conversation between
took place at 3:05 am on September 1st.
But this problem seemed to be ignored very quickly, because the two pilots of KAL 007 never discussed this issue again, and the plane continued to fly towards Seoul according to the established route.
0 minutes later, the plane suddenly vibrated violently.
Captain Qian Bingyin and deputy captain Sun Donghui didn't know what happened for a while. The preliminary judgment was that the pressure was lost in the cabin. Sun Donghui immediately requested the Tokyo Aviation Management Center to drop to a height of 10,000 feet.
The staff of the Tokyo Aviation Management Center immediately approved the request.
Captain Qian Bingyin has a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. The family is happy and happy
In the cabin, the passengers who had already fallen asleep were awakened and began to panic. The radio in the cabin rang:
"Emergency drop! Please put on an oxygen hood and adjust the headrest!"
In the cockpit, the captain Qian Bingyin put down the landing gear and tried to control the plane, but found that everything was futile.
At 3:38 am, the Japanese fishing boat "Chitouzumaru No. 58" located 18.5 nautical miles north of , Hidden City, heard a huge explosion.
Then, the fishermen saw a flash of fire from the sea. The news of the crash of
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KAL 007 quickly shocked the whole world.
According to reports, there were 72 Korean passengers, 61 American passengers, 24 Taiwanese passengers, 22 Japanese passengers, 9 Hong Kong passengers and 51 other passengers from various countries on the plane - , including US Congressman MacDonald, and the former US President Nixon , who eventually canceled the trip for some reason.
All passengers, together with 29 crew members, have not survived.
Just as the passenger's family was in great grief, the United States suddenly announced a shocking news:
KAL 007 flight was not a crash, but was shot down by a Soviet plane.
This news immediately caused a sensation around the world: military aircraft shot down civilian passenger planes, why is this?
Americans quickly came up with evidence - a top-secret monitoring station monitored the Soviets' conversation at the incident that night:
"The borders have been invaded, approaching and destroying the target!"
As soon as the evidence came out, the world was in an uproar.
The Soviet Union responded quickly, and initially their statement was:
They did monitor flight KAL 007 - because the plane flew into Soviet airspace - and intercepted it, but eventually gave up the interception and let the plane fly away.
But soon, the Soviet Union changed its words: We did shoot down!
However, the Soviet Union gave a reason for shooting down: this was a defense operation to defend the security of the country, because the KAL 007 flight was considered a spy plane breaking into Soviet airspace.
At a press conference on September 9, Marshal Olgakov, the Chief of Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, tried to prove that the United States had always had spy planes plaguing Soviet airspace at that time. But the first thing the Western people are concerned about is the Soviet Union’s statement on the air crash - the Soviet Union has been refusing to express its opinion.
KAL Is flight 007 a spy plane or civil aviation plane ? Did you break into Soviet airspace?
The Soviet Union and the United States both stood up and argued, and neither side was willing to give in.
983 was the most intense year for the two countries after the " Cuban Missile Crisis " of the United States and the Soviet Union. The two sides were tense in all fields and confronted each other. The Soviet Union shot down South Korea's civil aviation passenger plane caused great shock in the Western world.
The United States took the lead in accusing the Soviet Union of creating the "Korean Air massacre" and thus canceled the license for Russian Soviet Airlines to enter and exit the United States (it was not restored until 1986) , and negotiations on strategic missile reduction between the United States and the Soviet Union were suspended. NATO , as well as countries such as Japan, Australia and South Korea, have adopted a more intense confrontational attitude towards Eastern European Union countries led by the Soviet Union.
At that time, Korean people took to the streets to protest the Soviet Union's shooting down of KAL 007 flight
For a moment, some people even predicted that the KAL 007 incident of Korean Air would trigger World War III.
How to avoid further escalation of the situation?
The most urgent task is to find the wreckage of KAL 007 flight, especially black box .
On September 13, search and rescue operations in the waters crashed in the plane were fully launched. The Soviet Union also joined the search and rescue ranks, but announced that it would refuse all ships to enter its territorial waters. Due to the vague division of the high seas, ships from many countries have created a series of conflicts and frictions on the high seas, and Soviet ships even collided with South Korean ships.
The picture shows the American DD967 destroyer searching in the crashed waters at that time. Above it is the Soviet aircraft responsible for surveillance
While searching for the black box, the Americans activated their top-secret high-tech technology at the time: passive radar.
This radar can track the trajectory of all military and civil aircraft around the world. After radar recording analysis, the Americans were surprised to find that
KAL 007 flight did deviate from the route northward when it flew across the Pacific Ocean, and deviated as much as 560 kilometers. It did invade Soviet airspace more than once.
The Soviets claimed that they shot down an "invading aircraft" over the island of Sakhalin.
They really didn't lie.
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Then the question is: Why did flight KAL 007 break into the Soviet airspace?
United Nations sent an independent accident investigation team to conduct comprehensive speculation and simulation, and went to Boeing headquarters in Seattle, USA for assistance, and finally made an inference about the reason why the KAL 007 deviated from the route:
After taking off from Anchorage, the captain of KAL 007 flight Qian Bingyin had never turned on the "inertial navigation system" on the plane (INS) .
Simply put, " inertial navigation system " is an autonomous navigation system based on Newton's law and does not rely on external information and does not radiate energy to the outside. It measures the acceleration of the aircraft and automatically performs integration operations to obtain the instantaneous speed of the aircraft and instantaneous position data.
According to regulations, after the aircraft takes off, the captain should switch from the " magnetic compass " mode to the "inertial navigation system" to perform accurate flights. The "Inertial Navigation System" requires inputting coordinate points in advance - there are 9 coordinate points from Anchorage to Seoul. As long as these nine coordinate points are checked one by one, it is proved that the aircraft is flying along the correct R20 route.
KAL Flight 007 should fly R20. The nearest route is only 144 kilometers away from Soviet airspace, which has long made many civil aviation captains flying this route sweat.
At that time, the investigation team made two inferences: either the captain Qian Bingyin entered the wrong coordinates, or he forgot to open the system.
The first inference was quickly overturned, so there was only the second inference: Captain Qian Bingyin forgot to open the "inertial navigation system", but he was flying along the deviation direction guided by the magnetic compass.
But the problem is that there are nine coordinate points on the R20 route. According to regulations, every time a coordinate point passes, the captain should verify the accuracy of the inertial navigation system.According to records from the Tokyo Aviation Control Center, flight KAL 007 did report the correct coordinate points to them—which is also the reason why the first inference was overturned. But judging from the flight trajectory, the captain just routinely reported the trailer displayed by the computer and did not verify it.
In fact, the AVAC once found that using VHF (Very high frequency) could not be contacted with KAL 007, but it did not attract attention. On the road where KAL 007 was yawed, at least multiple US and Japanese military radars discovered it, but none of them attracted attention.
KAL 007 should have always thought that it was flying on the R20 route, but data shows that the KAL 007 flight has actually deviated northward from the R20 route to 560 kilometers, and has been constantly entering and leaving the Soviet airspace - the crew did not notice it at all.
KAL Flight 007 The actual route
An aircraft flew silently into other countries' airspace and kept in and out, which is indeed a very dangerous move.
What's more, this country was the Soviet Union, which was highly nervous at that time.
But even if the fact that KAL 007 was staggered was found, another big question could not be solved:
The Soviet radar and the Air Force did not make any distinction between aircraft entering their own airspace? Even though the KAL 007 flight did make mistakes first, it was a civilian plane after all, full of innocent passengers. Does it have to be shot down?
So, we still have to go back to the early morning of September 1, 1983.
What happened to the Soviet Union?
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In fact, as early as 12:51 am on September 1, the Soviet air defense radar had detected flight KAL 007 close to its own airspace.
But the incident happened: a week ago, due to the Arctic storm, the Soviet Union's air defense radar in this area was seriously damaged, so it was impossible to clearly judge a series of aircraft flight data.
After this, the unaware of KAL 007 flight continued to enter and exit Soviet airspace, and the Soviet military monitored the entire process was also quite "unmind-minded" - what does the other party mean?
During that period, the Soviet military was actually under great pressure.
981, after the US president Reagan came to power, he immediately fulfilled his campaign promise: to take a tougher attitude towards the Soviet Union. At his request, a mixed fleet of 83 ships of various types set out from the United States and deliberately passed through the Soviet territorial waters during his voyage.
Subsequently, the US media began to promote the great flaws in the Soviet maritime investigation system and early warning system. The Soviet Union, which was dull on the face of
, immediately launched revenge: the Soviet Western Army stationed in East Germany and the armies of many countries conducted a large-scale "Western 81" military exercise, mobilizing more than 1,500 main battle tanks, more than 1,000 combat aircraft, and more than 500,000 troops, and simulated the use of the tactical nuclear weapon open-circuit fighting method.
The steel torrent displayed by the Soviet army in the "Western 81" military exercise
Reagan did not retreat, but instead "the more he fought, the more courageous he became." After that, NATO organized a number of large-scale military exercises, many of which were carried out through air raids and airborne. The United States even unilaterally announced that it would deploy the "Pershing II" medium-range missile against the Soviet Union in Europe by the end of the year - the missile , which will only take 6 minutes to hit Moscow.
Faced with the uncharacteristic aggressive attitude of the United States, the Soviet Union was very nervous. The military was highly alert for any aircraft that broke into or could enter its own airspace, and was even prepared to "shoot down at all costs."
And in the early morning of September 1, the confused KAL 007 flight broke into Soviet airspace.
More importantly, just around that day, the Soviet Union was conducting a missile exercise at the airspace of the Kamchatka Peninsula military base that KAL 007 broke into.They got the exact information, and a US RC-135 electronic reconnaissance aircraft hovered in that airspace, eavesdropping on relevant information.
US RC-135 electronic reconnaissance aircraft, using Boeing 707 passenger aircraft as the body, does have some confusion in appearance
In the early morning that day, the US RC-135 did hover near Soviet airspace in the shape of "8" - its flight trajectory was near the wrong route of KAL 007 flight.
After the KAL 007 flight invaded Soviet airspace in the early morning of September 1, the Soviet side actually immediately sent an MiG 23 and three Su-15s to take off for surveillance, but the KAL 007 flight then left Soviet airspace.
At this time, General Kamansky, the commander of the Far East of the Soviet Air Force, was already angry. He believed that even if the mysterious plane flew to the high seas, it would be necessary to first identify whether it was a civilian passenger plane. But his subordinate, General Knukov, commander of Sokol Air Force Base, believed that it was not necessary to identify it and shot down directly because the aircraft had invaded the airspace of on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
In any case, the KAL 007 flight at this time has basically been defaulted to as a "military aircraft" by the Soviet military.
At 3:08 am on September 1, a Su15 fighter pilot from the 40th fighter pilot of the 11th Air Defense Army of the Soviet National Air Defense Force reported to the ground:
"I found that plane! But the line of sight is not good, and I can't recognize what plane it was!"
At this time, General Knukov, who was in charge of ground command, seemed to have taken back his words "no need to identify, shoot down directly" and asked the fighter pilot to further confirm the specific situation of the aircraft.
The Su 15 immediately flew close to KAL 007 flight.
At this time, the lives of this Boeing 747 passenger plane and the 269 people on board were all in the hands of one person -
Su15 pilot Gnadi Osbovich (Genadi Osipovich) .
The picture shows Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich
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When Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich drove the Su 15 fighter plane closer, he sent a report back to the ground:
"I saw flashing lights on the tail wing and the top of the plane, and I saw it The two rows of portholes looked like civil aviation aircraft, but the lights were very dim, and most of the portholes were closed, so I couldn't see clearly inside. "
But Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich believed that it was not important whether it was civil aviation passenger plane . He later recalled:
"It is very simple to convert a military aircraft into a civilian aircraft."
At this time, he did not expect to use radio to contact and warn the aircraft.
Su 15-TM fighter
At this time, General Knukov, who was commanding on the ground, was also hesitant. He hoped that his pilot could force the plane, but this seemed difficult to do - the plane was about to fly out of Soviet airspace soon.
Then, Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich received the order: Shooting warning!
He then flew up, almost parallel to the plane. He pressed the "Shoot" button four times, and fired a total of about 200 armor-piercing bombs.
Regularly speaking, if you want to fire and alert, tracer bullets should be used - in the dark night sky, it is almost impossible for a person to discover the armor-piercing bullets that do not glow.
However, tracer bullets have been out of stock for 6 months.
However, Lieutenant Colonel Osbovic still believes that the flames and light constantly ejected from the muzzle will definitely attract the other party's attention. He believes that this is very obvious in the night sky.
But the KAL 007 flight was still flying silently without any response.
After Osbovic retired, he always thought that what he encountered was a spy plane
If he continued to fly smoothly like this, it would be possible that the KAL 007 flight would be flew out of Soviet airspace again in a daze, and Lieutenant Colonel Osbovic might consider a change of forced landing.
But at this moment, the KAL 007 flight made a fatal move - starting to climb upwards.
Yes, in order to save fuel, Captain Chih Bingyin asked the Tokyo Aviation Control Center to climb to a height of 35,000 feet. The action of
ruined the last glimmer of life on flight KAL 007.
In the view of Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich, who was following it, the climbing action made by KAL 007 is a typical "military escape action" - once it climbs, its speed will slow down, and its plane will either fly over its head or be under it, thus losing its best attack position.
Looks like the high seas ahead, and the plane makes a "military escape action" at this time, and Osbovic confirmed that it was an invading enemy plane.
He immediately reported the situation to the ground command.
After a brief silence, the command from the ground command came:
"Fire!"
Lieutenant Colonel Osbovich quickly controlled the Su-15 fighter to turn down the slope, flew out an S-shaped route, opened the distance from KAL 007 flight, and quickly locked the target.
Two K-8 air-to-air missiles whizzed out at a speed of 2,000 kilometers per hour.
One hit the tail of KAL flight 007, and one suspected to have brushed the fuselage (there are also some sayings that it did not hit) , pulling out a hole - causing the pressure in the cabin to be quickly decompressed.
Later records show that the KAL 007 flight did not explode after being shot. Instead, it flew upwards in an arc-shaped route for 113 seconds, and dropped to 16,424 feet after reaching 38,250 feet. After that, it struggled for nearly 5 minutes. In the end, the captain Qian Bingyin and deputy captain Sun Donghui lost control of the plane.
It is speculated that the fuselage had broken before falling to the sea, and most passengers were still conscious.
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The reason why the plane crashed into the sea needs to be "speculated" is because the wreckage of KAL 007 flight has not been found yet.
Of course, the bodies of 269 passengers on the plane were not found.
In 1991, collapsed . In 1992, Russian President Yeltsin unexpectedly made a decision:
transferred some information related to the downfall of KAL 007 flight to South Korean President Lu Taiyu . Among the information in
, there is actually a black box that the Soviet Union claimed to have not been found.
Yeltsin transferred the black box
Some things that once thought were top secret also surfaced:
The Soviet Union actually found the black box 50 days after the accident, but because the recording of the black box was inconsistent with what they claimed to the outside world (called KAL 007 flight "spy plane" etc.) , I was afraid that international public opinion would set off a wave of "mocking the Soviet Union", so I decided to keep it confidential and released many "smoke screen bombs" in the crashed waters to mislead the search and rescue teams of other countries.
However, according to the recording, although there is no evidence to prove that this Korean Air aircraft is a "spy plane", other aspects are consistent with the original speculation by the accident investigation team: Chih Bingyin, the captain of flight
KAL 007, did not turn off the magnetic compass navigation after flying the plane away from Anchorage, and instead used the inertial navigation system, causing the aircraft route to continue to deviate northward and eventually penetrated into Soviet airspace, resulting in the tragedy.
On June 14, 1993, International Civil Aviation Organization held its 139th Council in Montreal, Canada, and announced the final investigation report on the reasons for the departure of the KAL007 passenger plane, which is basically consistent with the conclusions drawn by the previous investigation team.
However, the accident on KAL 007 has not really been "final" among the people.
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In the past 30 years, various " conspiracy theories " have been continuously surfaced:
Some people say that the KAL 007 flight was instructed by the United States to detect and test the Soviet Union's ability to defend airspace. Captain Qian Bingyin, an experienced former fighter pilot, had never made such a big low-level mistake before flying dozens of times in the Pacific Ocean;
Some people said that KAL Flight 007 was actually an electronic reconnaissance aircraft. The recording on the plane did not prove anything, but was a "smoke screen bomb" deliberately released;
Some people said that KAL Flight 007 was indeed a civilian flight, but that night the US RC-315 reconnaissance aircraft followed KAL 007 and followed into Soviet airspace.
Some people say that the "black box" tape handed over by the Soviet Union obviously had cut traces, and some important content was suspected to have been deleted (but the official statement is that after strict testing, the tape has not been modified. Another saying is that the United States modified the tape and deleted content that was unfavorable to them)
There are more alarmist things:
Some people say that on September 1, 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union actually had an air battle, and both sides suffered losses, and the dozens of so-called KALs handed over the Soviet Union later The "wrecks" of Flight 007 have been confirmed to be from other aircraft;
Some people say that the KAL Flight 007 did not actually disintegrate in the air, but was forced to land by the Soviet Air Force, and all passengers are still detained somewhere. The aircraft fragments in the image
were proved to be ejection seats of American fighter aircraft and flap fragments of EF-111 electronic combat aircraft. But it is also possible that it was caused by the previous crash in this sea area, rather than shooting down
, among the proposers of these speculations, there are retired generals from the Soviet Union, independent French investigative scholars, and relevant institutions from South Korea. Some of the ideas they put forward were purely imaginary imaginations, some gave some evidence and proposed some logical chains, but overall, they lacked evidence enough to turn the tables or convince people.
Unless there is new evidence, the accident on Korean Air Flight 007 can only be summarized as:
One yaw, one missile, and one tragedy.
Koreans who mourn relatives in the wrecked sea area
(end of this article)
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