Original subtitles

35,000 feet above the Sea of Japan.

Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.

We are experiencing rapid decompression.

Descend to 1-0 thousand.

The pilots have lost control of their plane.

Speed brake is coming out.

A 747 with 269 people on board

plunges toward the sea.

Within hours,

the story began circulating in Washington

that the Soviets had been involved.

This shocking incident escalates tensions

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.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are starting our approach.

We lost both engines!

Put the mask over your nose.

Emergency descent.

Pilot: Mayday, mayday.

Brace for impact!

I think I lost one.

Investigation starting...

He's gonna crash!

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.

...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 nearly 3,000-mile 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 connector 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?

35 knots from 040.

In an effort to conserve fuel,

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

Tokyo Center, 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 Center, Korean Air 007.

Korean Air 007, Tokyo.

We are experiencing rapid decompression.

Descend to 1-0 thousand.

Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.

Radio check on 10048.

Stand by, stand by, stand by!

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 been either 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 Schultz

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 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.

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 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 tensions.

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 inquiry is urgent.

The U.N. calls on

the International Civil Aviation Organization.

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're under pressure to find answers

and find them fast.

KAL 007's flight plan should have 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 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'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 R20.

Across the North Pacific,

there are various routes that are labeled.

The R20 was the one closest to Soviet airspace.

The red route one was a nickname for it, it was the one closest.

So it was known to be, or should have 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 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 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?

35 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 boxes 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

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 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's called I.N.S., the Inertial Navigation System.

The I.N.S. 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 coordinates

of latitude and longitude

with one-word names like Bethel, Neeva or Nippi.

Flight 007's I.N.S. should have been programmed

to find and follow those electronic guideposts to Seoul.

...18.0 north.

At 8:49, internal 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.

...473, turn right at...

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 in how many pieces it was, remained unknown.

With the investigation stalled,

Frostell turned 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 then Boeing carried out the simulation.

Waypoint number two, 59 degrees, 18...

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 I.N.S.

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 I.N.S. at the gate

could have taken the plane over the Soviet Union.

Ok, 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 have 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 I.N.S. Mode

would have 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 it 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

that 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 Osipovich

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

that 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 to be 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 I.D. washed up on the shore of Japan.

Of course getting that I.D. 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 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 going to tell me something.

I wanted to have the facts from the tapes

and then see how does 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 "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 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

that 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 the tape was spliced together.

Finally, investigators can listen to the tape,

confident that every word is authentic.

What?

It's already time for breakfast?

Do 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, intercept four American 10-37.

There is not a word on the tape

to suggest the crew was on a spy mission.

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.

It seems they simply forgot a basic step

in their standard flight procedure.

The I.N.S. was functioning properly,

had been loaded properly

and was counting along the route where it was,

thought it was supposed to be.

But the autopilot was not following the I.N.S. 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 have 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?

35 knots from 040.

The fact that they were experiencing

completely different weather patterns

than a plane supposedly minutes behind them

should have 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

and 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 they didn't notice they were straying off course.

Everybody makes mistakes sooner or later.

Good pilots make mistakes,

not so good pilot makes 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 1, 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.

Target traveling 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 had just been spooked,

and it was, 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 traveling at high speed

and approaching border.

Target is on your heading.

I can see it both visually and on the screen.

Major Gennadi Osipovich, 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 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.

Give warning burst with cannon.

When warning shots are fired,

they usually include tracers, which are like flares,

and are easily seen.

However, Osipovich 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,

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 could 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.

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 maneuver.

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 maneuver, 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.

Osipovich fires two air-to-air missiles.

They travel over 1,200 miles an hour 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 headband.

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 Osipovich 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.

And that's the way he wants to believe it.

And I'm not going to 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 going to see you again.

Korean 007 has had a great effect on my life.

It has been close to my heart.

That has been very sad for me.

And my sympathy and condolences all these years

have gone out to the families.