Original subtitles

Thirty-five-thousand feet above the Sea of Japan...

Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.

We are experiencing rapid decompression. Descend to 10,000.

...the pilots have lost control of their plane.

Speed brake is coming out.

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

Within hours, the story began circulating in Washington

that the Soviets had 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.

Mayday, mayday.

Emergency descent.

Put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.

Emergency descent.

Emergency descent. Put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.

Emergency descent. Put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.

Emergency descent.

Put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.

It's just after 2:00 in the morning aboard KAL Flight 007.

Korean Air 007 positioned over NIPPI.

Estimating NOKKA 1826132.0.

After a brief layover in Anchorage,

a Korean Airlines 747 is on its way to Seoul.

The marathon flight originated in New York 13 hours ago.

Captain Chun Byung-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 6,100-kilometre 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 Kimpo,

which will be in about three hours.

Many of the passengers plan to take connecting flights

to other destinations after landing in Seoul.

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

My sister Mary Jane found a job,

and she'd gotten hired by this car company.

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

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

Just 15 minutes behind them is the plane's sister flight,

KAL 015.

Korean Air 007.

- Go ahead, Korean Air 015. - What are you doing?

The flight crews chat to help pass the time.

We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.

How much of a tailwind?

Thirty-five knots from 040.

In an effort to conserve fuel,

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

Tokyo Centre, Korean Air 007.

Korean Air 007, Tokyo.

Korean Air 007. Request climb 350.

Roger. Stand by.

Korean Air 007, climb, and maintain flight level 350.

Roger. Korean Air 007. Climb, and maintain flight level 350.

Then, without warning, the plane is out of control.

What happened?

Retard throttles.

Landing gear.

Landing gear.

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

Altitude is going up.

Altitude is going up!

Altitude is going up!

Speed brake is coming out.

I can't descend.

This isn't working. This isn't working!

Engines are normal, sir.

- Captain? - Is it rapid decompression?

Tokyo Centre, Korean Air 007.

Korean Air 007, Tokyo.

We are experiencing rapid decompression.

Descend to 10,000.

Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.

Radio check on...

10048.

Stand by, stand by, stand by!

...headband. Emergency descent.

Korean Air 007, Tokyo.

Korean Airlines Flight 007

and all 269 people on board

have vanished.

Korean Air 015, would you attempt to contact Korean Air 007, please,

and relay position?

All efforts to contact the flight have failed.

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

I cannot contact Korean Air 007...

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 had perhaps gone wrong with the plane.

But at that point, we didn't really know anything.

There was concern that it had either been forced to land or crashed, or within hours,

the story began circulating in Washington that the Soviets had 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've 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.

It doesn't seem possible that the Soviets

would actually shoot down a passenger plane.

But American officials have little doubt.

The next morning,

U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz delivers an unusually blunt statement.

The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack.

Loss of life appears to be heavy.

We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.

It couldn't be. It just... it couldn't be.

How could they all just perish? What do you mean?

There must've 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.

Relations were bad, but no one really knew how bad,

how dangerously bad they were.

Initially,

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 it stop; it didn't, it flew away.

That was the first story.

But soon, they reverse course and come clean.

A Soviet fighter jet did, in fact, 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:

cameras, recorders and so forth.

The Soviet Union claims Flight 007 entered highly restricted airspace

under 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... the closest points that we may have come...

were in that year, both before and after, when both sides -

particularly the Soviet side, though -

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 need for an impartial enquiry is urgent.

The UN calls on the International Civil Aviation Organization.

ICAO offers a... 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're under pressure to find answers -

and find them fast.

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

Either it was shot down over international waters,

or the flight had strayed off 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, data recorder, cockpit voice recorder,

that's 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 ones searching.

On September 1,

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

and take part in the search for the Boeing 747.

It's 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 formally complain that the Soviets would either sail across U.S. ships,

that they would drop false pingers

to deflect listening devices away from the true pinger.

The Soviets claim Flight 007 was flying in Soviet airspace,

over Sakhalin Island, when they shot it down.

If that's true,

the aircraft was well outside its designated aerial corridor...

...a route known as R-20.

Across the North Pacific, there are various routes that are labelled.

The R-20 was the one closest to Soviet airspace.

Red Route One was a nickname for it. It was the one closest.

So it was known to be, or should've been 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 coordinates they were reporting...

...put them on course.

The Tokyo air-traffic controller who last communicated

with Flight 007 tells investigators that all seemed normal.

Korean Air 007 positioned over NIPPI.

Estimating NOKKA 1826132.0.

The crew reported they were flying the R-20 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 Korean Airlines flight

that was just minutes behind Flight 007.

Tell me about the exchange with Flight 007.

The captain of the second flight recounts an odd conversation

with the 007 crew.

We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.

How much of a tailwind?

Thirty-five knots from 040.

We still have a 15-knot headwind.

Could he be getting a headwind if he was here?

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...

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 shootdown.

A top-secret technology called "passive radar" can track the movements

of every military and civilian plane around the globe.

What it reveals about KAL 007 is stunning.

The plane was way off 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 kilometres

or 350 miles north of where it should've 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's called INS:

the Inertial Navigation System.

The INS that was used on this airliner, like most in that time period,

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

Very accurate. It would get you where you wanted to be.

The system relies on coordinates,

or waypoints, entered into the flight controller.

The way it works is that there is nine waypoints that you put in.

That's the way you program it.

59 degrees.

18.0 north.

Waypoints are essentially GPS coordinates

that also have one-word names,

like BETHEL, NEEVA or NIPPI.

Flight 007's INS should've been programmed

to find and follow those electronic guideposts to Seoul.

...59 degrees, 18.0 north.

At 8:49... heading 270.

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

Caj Frostell listens to the pre-flight conversation

between the crew and the tower in Alaska.

Korean Air 007, climb, and maintain flight level 310.

...73 turn right at 0...

It was total routine from the beginning to the end.

There was nothing exceptional with the takeoff 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 five 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 how many pieces it was in,

remained unknown.

With the investigation stalled,

Frostell turns to the plane's manufacturers.

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

that we knew Korean 007 had flown.

We went over to Boeing in Seattle,

and Boeing carried out the simulation.

Waypoint #2:

59 degrees, 18.0...

Retracing Flight 007's 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 co-pilot would insert...

the waypoints,

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

60 degrees,

47.1 north, check.

Misprogramming the INS at the gate

could've taken the plane over the Soviet Union.

Okay, let's try the flight in heading mode now.

A second, less likely possibility

is that after programming the waypoint navigation system,

the crew may have failed to turn it on.

After takeoff 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 takeoff,

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've kept the plane flying in the right direction,

but along a very different route than the one planned.

Captain Chun was a distinguished pilot with years of experience.

Forgetting to switch the autopilot to INS mode

would've been an astonishing error.

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

But what's even harder to understand

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

The Soviets resorted to deadly force to punish this intruder.

It's like shooting the paperboy 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 the 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 RC-135,

which was doing very, very slow figure eights

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 jetliner.

When their paths crossed,

the two planes may have been indistinguishable on Soviet radar.

When 007 came in over Soviet airspace...

...the Soviet Union assumed it's an RC-135.

Along came this intruder,

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

for such an intruder.

Upon violation of state border...

...approach target and destroy.

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?

Requests 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 four months after the disaster,

ICAO releases the findings of the investigation.

Though lacking hard evidence,

the report concludes 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 work

and the factual information we had in 1983.

For them to summarize the plane was there by accident, as far as I'm concerned,

that's not the answers we wanted to hear.

And we believed that there was 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 was clothing that washed up on the shore;

her ID washed up on the shore of Japan.

Of course, 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 found the all-important black boxes.

It was a big pile of debris.

They took down 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 jubilant end to 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're gonna tell me something.

I wanted to have the facts from the tapes and then see

how do those facts compare to what we wrote in 1983.

In 1992,

during official ceremonies in Seoul,

Russian leader Boris Yeltsin hands over the long-awaited flight recorders.

I was approached by a KGB general.

And he told me that, uh:

"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 looked 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 as a clear indication that the times have changed,

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

At the time, I was working at the Civil Institute of Aviation

and 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.

And so we had to 110% validate

the authenticity of the tape.

They had seals on them. They had...

I remember... wax seals on them.

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, 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 had 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 where it had broken,

and they did that on this high-magnification photograph.

One of the techniques that the French had that I hadn't seen before -

it wasn't used in the United States - was a photo-analysis machine.

They could do this with this optical high magnification.

They could actually see the magnetic waves.

The test confirms that no data was added or removed

from the cockpit voice recorder when it was spliced together.

Finally, investigators can listen to the tape,

confident that every word is authentic.

What? It's already time for breakfast.

You want to eat now?

Let's eat later.

But all they hear is idle banter from the crew.

I heard there's a currency exchange at the airport.

What kind of money?

Dollars to Korean money.

- It's in the domestic building. - 52010 to intercept... American 1037.

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

Just a totally routine conversation.

Either these guys are the most cold-blooded actors and falsifiers ever,

or they really were totally clueless about where they were.

Sadly, I think the latter's the case.

It seems 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 misprogrammed 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 takeoff 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.

Landing gear up.

Now passing 500.

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 thought it was supposed to be.

But the autopilot was not following the INS commands.

Instead, it was following a compass mode.

So it's only telling them where they're supposed to be.

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

and not the waypoints...

...the computer would've continued to display their intended waypoints,

even though the plane was nowhere near them.

Korean Air 007 positioned over NIPPI.

Estimating NOKKA...

1826132.0.

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.

We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.

How much of a tailwind?

Thirty-five knots from 040.

The fact that they were experiencing

completely different weather patterns to a plane supposedly minutes behind them

should've alerted them to the problem.

Now, there's a point...

where you see him teetering on the brink of realizing something is horribly wrong.

He's talking to the pilot behind him,

and the winds are almost 180 degrees apart.

And there's a pause.

And Chun is...

Somewhere in his mind... He's a pilot and he has the instinct:

You know, this is odd.

Is it a clue to something I should look into?

And he... doesn't.

And at that point, he might as well have pulled the gun out, put it to his head.

It was human error.

A complacent crew in the middle of the night

had 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're 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 the 1st, 1983.

The pilots believed they were on course,

but three 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.

The identity of the plane was just not known.

The clues that it was a lost civilian airliner, well, might've been there.

The clues that it was a 135 didn't add up,

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

Target travelling at high speed and approaching border.

But the fighters are not fast enough.

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

They figured that they'd just been spooked,

but that was all over.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, 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 second time.

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll soon be serving breakfast before we land in Kimpo,

which will be in about three hours.

Target travelling at high speed and approaching border.

Target is on your heading.

I can see it both visually and on the screen.

Major Gennadi Osipovitch, the lead fighter,

makes visual contact with Flight 007.

Give warning burst with cannon.

But the warning shots go unnoticed.

Take up position for attack.

Approach target and destroy.

Roger. Locked on already.

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 Osipovitch 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 could 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.

Give warning burst with cannon.

When warning shots are fired, they usually include tracers,

which are like flares and are easily seen.

However, Osipovitch has no tracers loaded in his cannon.

They're supposed to load tracers.

Just no one had shipped them any for the last six months, so they weren't there.

But even without the tracers,

Osipovitch 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 could he not turn around and see me?

I was flying with lights, everything was according to protocol.

He should've seen me.

And then a horrible coincidence seals the fate

of 269 people aboard the flight.

Korean Air 007. Request climb 350.

Korean Air 007, climb, and maintain flight level 350.

Like a car going uphill, 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's how I knew that he's 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.

This is what we were trained to do.

I fell a little behind him and banked down, made a snake manoeuvre,

put some distance between us, because otherwise,

the rockets would not have locked on.

He's running out of time,

because the airliner was approaching international waters.

Take up position for attack.

Roger. Locked on already.

Executed launch.

Osipovitch fires two air-to-air missiles.

They travel 2,000 kph towards the jetliner.

One of them explodes near the tail,

damaging vital controls and hydraulic lines.

The warhead 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's it.

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

Emergency descent.

Put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.

Emergency descent. Put the mask over your nose and adjust the head...

In the time that they lost pressurization,

to a certain point indicated

that the hole would have been approximately 1.75 square feet.

The crew managed 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 5,000 feet per minute.

The stricken jetliner plummeted towards the Sea of Japan...

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

And that's when the recording stops.

Our determination was that 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.

We weren't blaming him, but some families did. They certainly did.

They said it was his fault and he pressed the button and 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,

there were no passengers on board,

that he had not killed 269 people.

Uh, and that's the way he wants to believe it.

And I'm not gonna blame him for wanting to believe that.

In 1993,

Caj Frostell has the evidence that he sorely 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 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 primed ahead of time.

When my sister Mary Jane said goodbye to me at the airport,

she hugged me so, so tightly.

And I said, "Mary Jane, I feel like I'm never gonna to see you again."

Korean 007 has had a great effect on my life.

It has been close to my heart. That had been very sad for me.

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

difuze