Air Emergency (2003–…): Season 9, Episode 5 - Target Is Destroyed - full transcript

35000 ft above the sea of Japan.

The pilots have lost control of their plane.

A 747 with 269 people on board plunged
towards the sea.

Within hours, the story begins
circulating in Washington that

the Soviets have been involved

This shocking incident escalates tension
between two bitter rivals.

The investigation is mired
in secrecy and deception.

It's up to investigators to find the answer.

before the crash of a passenger jet
leads to an all-out war.

Brokkenpiloten Seizoen 9
Editie 05

It's just after 2:00 AM aboard KAL Flight 007



After a brief layover in Anchorage,
a Korean Airlines 747 is on its way to Seoul.

The marathon flight originated in New York
14 hours ago.

Captain Shang Yang In

has nearly 11 years experience
flying for Korean Airlines.

Before that,
he served 10 years in the Korean Air force.

This leg of the flight
is a 6100 km journey over the North Pacific.

Once the plane is in the air,
there is very little for the pilots to do.

'Ladies and gentlemen,
we'll soon be serving breakfast...

...before we land in Gimpo
which will be in about 3 hours'

Many of the passengers plan to take
connecting flights to other destinations

after landing in Seoul.

Mary Jane Henry is heading to Japan
to start a new life.

My sister Mary Jane found a job
and she's gotten hired by this company

She was exactly the kind of person
that they needed in Tokyo.



So, she was leaving to embark on this new stage
of her career.

Just 15 minutes behind them is their sister-flight

KAL 015

The flight crews chat,
to help past the time.

'We are experiencing
an unexpectedly strong tailwind'

How much of a tailwind?

35 knots, 040

In an effort to conserve fuel,

the crew decides to take the plane
to a higher altitude.

Tokyo, here Korean Air 007

Korean Air 007, this is Tokyo

Korean Air 007
We request to climb to 35000 ft

Roger, standby

Korean Air 007
climb and maintain flight level 35000 ft

Roger, Korean Air 007
climb and maintain flight level 35000 ft

Then, without warning,
the plane is out of control

Landing gear

Landing gear

The crew extends the landing gear
in an effort to stop the plane from climbing

'The altitude is going up'

'The altitude is going up'

'I can't descend!'

It isn't working

We have now a rapid decompression

We hope the next time you choose Korean Air again

We are experiencing a rapid decompression

We set to 10.000 ft

Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable

Radio check on 10048

Standby, standby,

Korean Air 007, this is Tokyo

Korean Airlines Flight 007
and all 269 people on board,

have vanished.

All efforts to contact the flight have failed.

Tokyo makes calls to other radar stations
in Japan and Korea.

A call is even made to a radar -facility
in the Soviet Union.

Relatives nervously await news
of the missing flight.

The company that Mary Jane was going to work for

They apparently had phoned and said:
Mary Jane's plane hadn't arrived

and that something perhaps had gone wrong
with the plane

But I thought:
We didn't really know anything

There was concern that they had
either forced to land or crashed

or within hours,
the story begins circulating in Washington,

that the Sovjets have been involved.

As the world waits for news about the incident,

U.S. military officials make a horrible discovery.

At a top secret surveillance facility,
they have been monitoring Soviet transmissions.

It appears the unthinkable has happened.

At the time of the
flight's disappearance,

U.S. soldiers heard what they thought
was a routine Soviet training mission.

Upon violation of state border...

...approach target and destroy.

It doesn't seem possible that the Soviets
would actually shoot down a passenger plane.

But American officials have little to doubt.

The next morning,

U.S. secretary of state George Schultz
delivers an unusually blunt statement.

'The United States reacts
with revulsion to this act.

Loss of life appears to be heavy.

We can see no excuse whatsoever...

for this appalling act

It couldn't be

It couldn't be

How can they all just perish,
what do you mean?

There must have been a reason.

1983 is the height of the Cold War.

Russia and much of Eastern Europe
are united by communist ideology.

Ruled with an iron fist,

the Soviet Union is locked
in a bitter political struggle with the West.

The relations were bad,

but no one really knew how bad.

how dangerously bad they were.

Initially,

the Soviet officials deny
responsibility for the KAL disaster.

The story that came out of Moscow was
that the plane appeared,

we intercepted it, tried to make a stop,
but it didn't, It flew away.

That was the first story.

But soon they reverse course and come clean

A Soviet fighter jet did shoot the plane down

but they insist the attack was justified.

The Soviet view was that it was on a spy mission,
perhaps carrying instruments

camera's, recorders and so forth.

The Soviet Union claims Flight 007
entered highly restricted airspace

on the orders from the U.S. government

But the U.S. insists KAL 007
was a routine passenger flight.

The dispute only heightens political tension.

In terms of an actual shooting war,

the closest point that we may have come
were in that year, before and after,

when both sides, particularly the Soviet side,
was expecting an attack

The KAL disaster would put
NATO nuclear disarmament-talks in jeopardy.

The Soviets would ultimately walk away.

The nuclear threat is growing.

Under such circumstances,
the lead for an impartial enquiry is urgent

The UN calls on
the International Civil Aviation Organisation

ICAO offers a neutral investigation,

an investigation team that can deal
with all parties involved in a neutral way.

Caj Frostell joins the international
team of investigators

that will try to uncover the truth
behind the destruction of Flight 007.

With two superpowers squaring off,

they are under pressure to find answers

and find them fast.

KAL 007's flight plan should have kept well away
from Soviet's airspace.

Either it was shot down over international waters,

or the flight had strayed of course.

Figuring out which is the first priority
for investigators.

But they face a huge obstacle.

The plane's black boxes are still missing

The lack of flight recorders, FDR, CVR,
that is significant in an investigation.

The Americans join forces with South Korea
and Japan in the search for the crucial devices.

But the three allied Nations
are not the only one searching.

On September 1st,

we got an order to go to the place
where the Boeing fell

and take part in the search for the Boeing 747

It is a race to find the black boxes

The Americans know they may never get the truth
if the Soviets find the boxes first.

Each side accuses the other of dirty tricks.

The U.S. did formerly complain
that the Soviets sail across U.S. ships

that they have dropped
false pingers,

to deflect listening devices
away from the true pinger

The Soviets claim 007 was flying in
Soviet airspace over Sakhalin island

when they shot it down.

If that is true,

the aircraft was well outside
its designated aerial corridor.

A route, known as R20.

Across the North Pacific, there are various routes

They are labelled the R20,
the one closest to Soviet airspace

Red route 1 was a nickname for it,
it was the one closest

It was known to be

or should be known to be,
a route that you took extra precautions on

Investigators get their first hint that
if the crew was flying in restricted airspace,

they didn't know it.

The Tokyo Air traffic controller who
last communicated with Flight 007,

tells investigators, that all seemed normal.

The crew reported they were flying the R20-route.

But as with every other flight over the Pacific,

007 was beyond Tokyo's radar-range

The controller could only rely on the pilots
to verify their position.

Perhaps they were mistaken
about where they were.

That possibility becomes more likely

when investigators talk
to the crew of the KAL's flight

that was just minutes
behind Flight 007

Tell me about the exchange with Flight 007

The Captain of the 2nd flight
recounts an odd conversation with the 007 crew

We are experiencing
an unexpectedly strong tailwind.

'How much of tailwind?'

35 knots, direction 040

We thought of a 15 knot headwind

It would be almost impossible for one flight
to have a tailwind,

and the other a headwind.

Something doesn't add up

But with the black box still missing

investigators have no way of knowing

where KAL 007 actually was
at the time of that exchange.

That made it very difficult,

in the way that we had
no direct information

that I would normally have
as an accident investigator.

Frostell gets more information
from an unlikely source.

The U.S. military.

In a rare move,

U.S. officials share highly
classified surveillance data

from the night of
the shoot-down.

A top-secret technology,
called passive radar,

contract the movements of every military
and civilian plane around the globe.

What it reveals about KAL 007 is stunning.

The plane was way of course.

For almost its entire journey across the pacific,

the flight had been drifting North.

By the time it was shot down, Flight
007 was 560 kms or 350 miles North

of where it should have been.

And had already flown in and out
of Soviet territory.

The Soviets were telling the truth.

And then, it becomes a question of determining:

Why was it off course that much?

To find the answer,

investigators turn their attention
to the navigation system on board the 747

It is called INS, the Inertial Navigation system.

The INS was used on this airline
like most of that time-period

it had an accuracy
of about half a mile of drift per hour

Very accurate,
it will get you where you want to be.

The system relies on coordinates, or waypoints,
entered into the flight controller.

The way it works is that
there are 9 waypoints that you put in

That is the way you program it

'59 degrees, 18.0 North

Waypoints are essentially GPS coordinates
that also have one word names

Like BETHEL or NEEVA or NIPPI

Flight 007's INS should
have been programmed

to find and follow this
electronic guidepost to Seoul.

Perhaps there was some last-minute change
in the flight plan.

Caj Frostell listens to the preflight conversation
between the crew and the Tower in Alaska

It was total routine from the beginning to the end

There was nothing exceptional
with the take-off,

or the taxiing
to position the preparation for the flight

After leaving Anchorage, the 747 flew
out over the Pacific, just as planned.

But it never made it to the first waypoint.

Instead, it drifted off course
for more than 5 hours.

Hope of uncovering the reasons why
begins to fade.

A 10 week effort to recover the flight recorders
has turned up nothing.

The search is called off

The actual aircraft, where it was
and in how many pieces it was,

remained unknown.

With the investigations stalled,
Frostell turns to the plane's manufacturers.

The U.S. and Boeing offered
to simulate the route

that we knew that Korean 007 had flown.

We went over to Boeing in Seattle
and Boeing carried out the simulation.

Waypoint number 2

Retracing Flight 007 steps in a simulator
leaves them with a few possibilities

One is that a mistake was made
while entering the coordinates into the INS

"60 degrees, 47.1 North

Normally the copilot would insert the waypoints

and the captain would check
that the correct digits have been put in.

Miss-programming the INS at the gate
could have taken the plane over the Soviet Union

'Okay, let's try to fly heading North, now.

A 2nd, less lightly possibility is that
after programming the navigation system,

the crew may have
failed to turn it on.

After take off from Anchorage,

the aircraft would have used a constant
magnetic heading to get to the route.

It's a standard procedure to begin a flight,
using a magnetic compass-heading for direction.

Soon after take off,

the pilots must activate the navigation system,
so it can lock on to the first waypoint.

And if it was forgotten,
in that constant magnetic heading,

it would continue over Soviet airspace.

The magnetic heading would have kept the plane
flying in the right direction

but along a very different route,
than the one planned.

Captain Chang was a distinguished pilot
with years of experience.

Forgetting to switch the autopilot to INS-mode,
would have been an astonishing error.

At this point Frostell can only speculate
why flight 007 was off course.

But what is even
harder to understand,

is why the Soviet Union would risk
starting a war by shooting a plane down.

The Soviets resort to deadly force
to punish this intruder

It's like shooting the paper-boy
in your front yard at night

because you think he might
be breaking into your house

What could prompt such a response
from the Soviets ?

Investigators get their answer from U.S. military

Though Flight 007 may not have been
on a spy mission that night,

another plane was.

A U.S. air force RC-135.

They were tracking an RC135
which was doing real slow

figurates off the coast with
its own listening devices

waiting for a Soviet missile test.

The spy-plane was near the Soviet border
in the path of the KAL-jet-liner

When their paths crossed,

the two planes may have been
indistinguishable on Soviet radar

When the 007 came in, over Soviet airspace,

The Soviet Union assumed it is an RC-135

Along came this intruder

and they just fell into the patterns
that they had prepared in advance

for such an intruder.

But disturbing questions remain.

Did the fighter pilot get close enough
to see the target with his own eyes?

Did he know it was a passenger-jet?

Request to speak to fighter-pilot
Gennadi Osipovitch are refused.

And for the time being at least

those questions are left unanswered.

In December 1983,
less than 4 months after the disaster,

ICAO releases the findings of the investigation.

Though lacking hard evidence,

the report concludes that Flight 007
strayed into Soviet airspace by accident.

Due to pilot error
in operating the navigation system.

I would almost call
it the best guess,

based on all the book- and the
factual information that we had in 1983.

For them to summarize
that the plane was there by accident

as far as I am concerned
that is not the answers we wanted to hear

and we believe
that there is further investigation to do.

The key to this mystery
remains locked inside the plane's black boxes.

which are assumed lost forever beneath the sea.

In the months following
the KAL-disaster,

unidentifiable human remains
wash ashore in Northern Japan.

Small pieces of wreckage are also found

Investigators have no doubt
that the plane was completely destroyed.

We don't know where their bodies lie,

There is clothing that is washed upon the shore
there is ID that is washed upon the shore of Japan

Ho is getting that ID back
was at least we had something

Like the victims families,

investigators have no clear idea
where Flight 007 went down.

But there are some people who do

Top-soviet-officials are hiding the fact
that one month after the incident,

not only did they find the wreckage,
they also find the all-important black boxes.

It was a big pile of debris,
they took this pile with their bare hands

until they found the black boxes.

There were two of them.

But the Soviets keep the boxes to themselves.

The information is kept locked away.

until nearly 10 years later,

After the turn of the decade
brings a jubelend end of the cold war

Glasnost ushers in
a new spirit of openness in Russia

Eager to break with the past,

the new administration in Moscow
decides to go public.

The actual unveiling of the data recorders
and black boxes was a total surprise.

And suddenly this new material
promised some real answers

So, I knew they are going to tell me something

I wanted to have the facts from the tapes.

and then see how does those facts
compared to what we wrote in 1983

In 1992, during official ceremonies in Seoul,

Russian leader Boris Jeltsin hands over
the long awaited flight recorders.

I was approached by KGB general
and he told me that

'You probably don't know me,
but I have had the recorders for 10 years

I had them in the safe in my office

I knew it was a big international secret,
It bothered me tremendously.

Every day when I came to the office,
and I look at my safe,

and I knew the recorders were there.

He told me: You may not understand that
this is the happiest day in my life.

Caj Frostell is asked to lead the new team
of investigators, based in Paris.

And there is a clear indication
that the times have changed,

Vladimir Kofman, a Russian avionics expert,
joins the team.

At the time when I was working
at the civil institute of aviation,

and I was an air-crash investigator

This was an international investigation
of a very high level.

Their first task is to make sure
the black boxes are authentic.

There was a high suspicion
in a lot of quarters

that the Russians or the Soviets had tampered
with the tapes or had made bogus tapes

So we had to 110% validate
the authenticity of the tape.

They had seals on it, wax seals

The photographs were taken,
the seals were cut,

Investigators confirm that the CVR,
handed over by the Russians

is the same box that was installed on Flight 007.

They opened them
and looked at them

and validated the serial numbers

They validated the model numbers.

Now that they know they have the right boxes,

investigators need to make sure
they have not been tampered with.

Suspicion soon arises.

During the cleaning process,
they noted that there had been some breaks in the tape.

and it have been spliced,
by the Russians

It is not uncommon for a tape to break
during the impact of a crash.

But distrust of the former Soviet Union runs deep.

First they examined these areas of the splices
were it had broken

and they did that
on a high magnification photograph

One of the techniques that the French had,

I hadn't seen before,
it wasn't used in the United States

was a photo-analyses machine

They can do this with this
optical high magnification

they can see the magnetic waves

The test confirms that no data was
added or removed from the CVR

when it was spliced together.

Finally, investigators can listen to the tape

confident that every word is authentic.

'It is already time for breakfast'.

'But all they hear is idle banter from the crew.

There is not a word on the tape
that suggest the crew was on a spy mission.

It is a totally routine conversation

Either, these guys must have been
cold blooded actors, and falsify as ever...

or they really were totally clueless
about where they were

Sadly, I think the latter is the case.

It seemed unlikely
that KAL 007 was on a spy mission.

But it was caught flying over Soviet territory

Investigators have
long suspected

that the crew either miss-programmed
their navigation system

or left it in the wrong mode.

set on constant magnetic heading

The flight data recorder
finally provides the definitive answer.

The data revealed that the
aircraft was on constant magnetic heading

from soon after take off
from Anchorage to the end

There was no deviation whatsoever
in the magnetic heading.

The crew of KAL 007 never activated
the waypoint navigation system.

Gear up.

Now passing 500 ft

It seems they simply forgot a basic step
in their standard flight procedure.

The INS was functioning properly,
had been loaded properly

and was counting along the route
where it was thought to suppose to be.

But the autopilot
was not following the INS command.

Instead, it was following the compass mode.

Investigators learn that even though
the plane was following a compass heading,

and not the waypoints,

the computer would have continued to
display their intended waypoints,

even though the plane was nowhere near them.

This may explain why the crew never noticed
their mistake.

The crew also didn't notice a key-indication
that they were badly off course.

The fact that they were experiencing
completely different weather patterns

to a plane, supposedly minutes behind them

should have alerted them to the problem

Now, there is a point
where you see them teetering on the brink

of realizing something as horribly wrong.

He's talking to the pilot behind him

and the winds are almost 180 degrees apart.

Then there is a pause

Somewhere in his mind, as a pilot,

He thinks:
This is odd!

Is it a clue of something I should look in to?

And he doesn't!

And at that point,

he might as well pull the gun out of
and put it to his head

It was human error.

A complacent crew in the middle of the night
have their flight computer on the wrong setting

and then didn't notice
they were straying off course

Everybody makes mistakes sooner or later.

Good pilots make mistakes
not so good pilots make mistakes.

We are all making mistakes.

When investigators combine
the conversation data from Flight 007,

with intercepted Soviet transmissions,

they get a detailed picture
of what went wrong on September 1st, 1983

The pilots believe they were on course.

but 3 hours into the flight,

their magnetic heading took them
into Soviet airspace over Kamchatka

The Soviet military
had been tracking a U.S. reconnaissance plane

There was a real American spy-plane.
It was there.

There were two planes that looked alike

When KAL penetrated the border,
the perception was that this was the plane

As the passengers sleep through
their long journey,

the Soviets scramble fighters
to intercept the plane.

They downed the plane with just not knowing
it was an airliner

while it might have been there

The clue that it was a RC-135 didn't add up

but the Soviets didn't have time
to think it through.

But the fighters are not fast enough

The plane leaves Soviet airspace
and continues along its heading to Seoul.

They figured that they just have been spooked

and that was all over.

Unfortunately, it wasn't

The airliner is just seconds
from flying over the island of Sakhalin

So, Sakhalin was prepared.

KAL Flight 007 enters Soviet airspace
for the 2nd time.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we'll soon be serving breakfast before we
land in Gimpo which will be in about 3 hours

American travelling at high speed
in the Russian borders

I can see it both visually and on the screen

Major Gennadi Osipovitch, the lead fighter,
makes visual contact with Flight 007.

But the warning shots go unnoticed.

They got position for attack.

Approach target and destroy

Executed launch

Target is destroyed.

The fighter pilot believed the 747
was an enemy spy plane.

It takes nearly a decade
after he shot down KAL 007...

...for that pilot to tell his side of the story

Investigators have long wondered what
Major Gennadi Osipovich saw and did

after he was ordered to intercept
an intruding aircraft in 1983.

After nearly 10 years
and the collapse of the communist regime,

he finally tells his side of the story.

I saw the plane

It did look like a civilian plane,
because there was a flashing light on its tail

and one on the top.

But you can disguise any plane like this.

You can put a flashing light on,
and you've got a civilian plane.

So I did not have any thoughts about this.

When warning shots are fired,
they usually include traces which are like flares

and are easily seen.

However Osipovich had no traces
loaded in his cannon.

They are supposed to load traces

so no one has shipped them any
for the last 6 months, so

they weren't there.

But even without the traces

Osipovich thinks the 747 crew
should have seen him.

As I caught up with them,
I was flying like this

and he was flying like that

How can he not turn around and see me?

I was flying with lights,
everything was according to protocol

He should have seen me.

And then a horrible coincidence
seals the fate of 269 people aboard the flight

Like a car going up hill,

a climbing plane slows down.

But to the fighter pilot following the 747

this is interpreted as an evasive manoeuvre

He decreased his speed,
so that I could either pass him or fall

One of the two.

So that is how I knew
that he is an enemy intruder.

That convinced him
that it was not a civilian plane

and that he was in danger.

My only thought was to catch and stop.

That was what we were trained to do.

I flew a little behind him and banked down

I made a snake manoeuvre.

It puts some distance between us

because otherwise,
the rockets would not have locked on.

He was running out of time

because the airliner was
approaching international waters.

Osipovich fires 2 air to air-missiles.

They travelled 2000 km/hour towards the jet-liner.

One of them explodes near the tail,
damaging vital controls and hydraulic lines.

The war-head also tears a hole in the fuselage,
causing a rapid decompression in the cabin.

I saw the first explosion, right under the tail,
and that is it.

The lights of the trespasser went out,
and I went home

In the time that they
lost pressurization

to a certain point indicated
that the hole would have been approx. 1.75 ft²

The crew manage to fly the crippled plane
for several minutes.

Immediately after the missile-impact,
the aircraft climbed to flight level 380

And then it descended about 5000 ft/minute

The stricken jet-liner plummeted
towards the sea of Japan...

...with most of its passengers
likely still conscious.

That's when the recording stopped.

The airframe probably broke up at that point

To this day,

Gennadi Osipovitch is convinced
he shot down a spy-plane.

I knew they wouldn't order me to intercept
if it was a civilian plane or a cargo plane

Only if it was a trespasser.

No one blaming him,
but some families certainly did

They said:
It was his fault

He pressed the button,
He shot them down.

And they were looking to blame somebody.

It was clear that he was living
with what he had done.

And what he had done,
in order for him to live and to sleep

was to believe that
it was a spy-plane

that there were no passengers on board,

that he not killed 269 people

And that's the way he wants to believe it
and I am not going to blame him.

In 1993,

Caj Frostell has the evidence that he solely
lacked when he issued his first report

He can prove how the Korean pilots blundered
and ended up off course.

And how the Soviet pilot interpreted the situation

The destruction of Flight 007
is ruled an accident.

Frostell recommends that all passenger
planes be equipped with a clear indicator,

that the autopilot is in heading-mode

The tragedy of the 007 is that
it didn't have to happen,

It was not inevitable

It was a series of accidents

...a series of misunderstandings...

A series of bad decisions
that had been to prime to headed time

When my sister May Jane
said goodbye to me at the airport

she hugged me so tightly

Then I say: Mary Jane,

I feel like I am never going to see you again.

Korean 007 has had a great effect on my life

It has been close to my heart.

It has been very sad for me

My sympathy and condolences all these years
have gone out to the families

Narrator:
Jonathan Aris

Subtitles:
Rein Croonen