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During the second half of the Cold War, the Soviet Union primarily pursued a policy of isolationism. Travel from the nation to the outside world was extremely restricted, and almost no foreign aircraft were ever permitted to enter the country’s airspace.
Advanced spy aircraft, like the subsonic high-altitude Lockheed U-2 and the record-setting SR-71 Blackbird, were both able, at times, to penetrate Soviet airspace for reconnaissance purposes. As a result, the USSR strictly controlled its airspace and explicitly forbade any foreign aircraft from traversing it for any reason.
Soviet Air Traffic Controllers only spoke Russian, preventing any communication with foreign aircraft even in the event that they may have accidentally entered the nation’s prohibited skies. As one might expect, this ultimately led to a catastrophe when navigation equipment failed to function properly and accidentally guided a foreign civilian airliner into Soviet airspace.
On a balmy summer’s night at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York on August 31st, 1983, passengers boarded a Korean Air Lines flight to Gimpo International Airport (GMP) in Seoul, South Korea. However, the plane, a Boeing 747-230B with the registration HL7442 which took off at 23:50 EDT, would never arrive at its final destination.
Following a stop in Anchorage, Alaska, to change crews and refuel, the plane took off for South Korea. The pilot on the North American leg of the journey reported onboard radio and navigational equipment problems. An on-duty mechanic was called to come and take a look, and both he and the Captain taking over the flight signed an airline document stating that everything was working correctly.
It is worth pointing out here that it was typical for aircraft flying to East Asia to land and refuel in Anchorage during the Cold War. With previously discussed airspace restrictions over the Soviet Union and China, early-generation widebodies would not have the range to traverse such large distances without stopping to reload on fuel.
After take-off from Anchorage, Air Traffic Control instructed the plane to turn to a heading of 220 degrees. Around 90 seconds later, the ATC told the plane to proceed directly over Bethel, Alaska, and enter the northernmost North Pacific route between Alaska and Japan. In the case of flight 007, this put them 17.5 miles outside of Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula.
However, approximately ten minutes after taking off, flight 007 began to deviate to the right (north) of its assigned route to Bethel. Following this deviation, the 747 continued to fly on this course for the next five and a half hours. According to CNN, the aircraft had deviated more than 200 miles from its planned route.
Still unaware that they were flying off course when flight 007 entered Soviet Airspace, four MiG-23 fighters, a mainstay of the Soviet combat fleet at the time, were scrambled to intercept what to them was an unknown aircraft, according to Britannica.
Ten days earlier, high winds had knocked out a significant radar base on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Local officials lied and said it was operational once more, rather than telling Moscow that the radar station was still down.
This delayed the fighters from getting a visual sighting of flight 007. Initially, this prevented it from being intercepted, as it crossed over the Kamchatka Peninsula and back into international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk.
However, having now left Soviet Airspace, the country’s authorities falsely concluded that it was a foreign spy plane and a military target. As such, when flight 007 once more entered Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island, three Su-15 fighters were scrambled to intercept the four-engine, double-decker widebody airliner.
Despite still not having officially determined if the aircraft was civilian or military, the order to shoot it down was given to prevent it from leaving Soviet airspace for a second time.
The lead fighter got into position and fired two K-8 air-to-air missiles at the plane, causing it to continue flying for a further 12 miles before crashing into the sea off Sakhalin Island, sadly killing all 269 passengers and crew, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
As established, the aircraft shot down while operating Korean Air flight 007 was a Boeing 747-230B registered as HL7442. According to the Aviation Safety Network, it was 11 years and six months old at the time, having first flown in March 1972. Data from the AeroTransport Data Bank shows that it joined Korean Air in February 1979, having previously flown for German carriers Lufthansa and Condor.
The international fallout from the incident was incredibly swift. Western world leaders were simply not going to accept the USSR shooting down civilian aircraft without serious consequences.
When news of the shoot-down reached Washington, President Ronald Reagan called the attack a ‘massacre’ and a ‘crime against humanity’ with “absolutely no justification, legal or moral.” At the time of the incident, it was probably as close as the US and the Soviet Union had got to war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Even today, civilian aircraft being in the wrong place can lead to tragic mistakes. For example, we witnessed this in July 2014, when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by Russian separatists over Ukraine. More recently, January 2020 saw the shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 by Iranian forces (who mistook it for a ‘hostile target’) after the flight took off from Tehran.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the era of international global aviation cooperation has come to a saddening end. Russia once again closed its skies to all foreign aircraft, requiring them to reroute around its borders.
Some foreign airlines, like those from China, are still allowed to traverse Russian airspace, giving them a competitive advantage on some routes. But for the rest of the world’s airlines, an abundance of caution must be taken to ensure such tragic incidents do not occur again.
