page_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: This commemorates the shooting down of the Korean Airlines flight 007 on 1 September 1983. It happened north of Moneron Island west of Sakhalin Island but this is the closest point to there, outside of Russia.
context_page_description: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska. On September 1, 1983, the South Korean airliner servicing the flight was shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but due to a navigational mistake made by the KAL crew the airliner deviated from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace about the time of a U.S. aerial reconnaissance mission. The Soviet Air Forces treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S. spy plane, and destroyed it with air-to-air missiles, after firing warning shots which were likely not seen by the KAL pilots. The Korean airliner eventually crashed in the sea near Moneron Island west of Sakhalin in the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a United States Representative from Georgia. The Soviets found the wreckage under the sea on September 15, and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret until 1993.
context_section_description: The FAA temporarily closed Airway R-20, the air corridor that Korean Air Flight 007 was meant to follow, on September 2. Airlines fiercely resisted the closure of this popular route, the shortest of five corridors between Alaska and the Far East. It was therefore reopened on October 2 after safety and navigational aids were checked.
  NATO had decided, under the impetus of the Reagan administration, to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in West Germany. This deployment would have placed missiles just 6–10 minutes striking distance from Moscow. Support for the deployment was wavering and it looked doubtful that it would be carried out. When the Soviet Union shot down Flight 007, the U.S. was able to galvanize enough support at home and abroad to enable the deployment to go ahead.
  The unprecedented disclosure of the communications intercepted by the United States and Japan revealed a considerable amount of information about their intelligence systems and capabilities. National Security Agency director Lincoln D. Faurer commented: "...as a result of the Korean Air Lines affair, you have already heard more about my business in the past two weeks than I would desire... For the most part this has not been a matter of unwelcome leaks. It is the result of a conscious, responsible decision to address an otherwise unbelievable horror." Changes that the Soviets subsequently made to their codes and frequencies reduced the effectiveness of this monitoring by 60%.
  The U.S. KAL 007 Victims' Association, under the leadership of Hans Ephraimson-Abt, successfully lobbied U.S. Congress and the airline industry to accept an agreement that would ensure that future victims of airline incidents would be compensated quickly and fairly by increasing compensation and lowering the burden of proof of airliner misconduct. This legislation has had far reaching effects for the victims of subsequent aircraft disasters.
  The U.S. decided to utilize military radars to extend air traffic control radar coverage from 200 to 1,200 miles (320 to 1,930 km) out from Anchorage. The FAA also established a secondary radar system (ATCBI-5) on Saint Paul Island. In 1986, the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union set up a joint air traffic control system to monitor aircraft over the North Pacific, thereby giving the Soviet Union formal responsibility to monitor civilian air traffic, and setting up direct communication links between the controllers of the three countries.
  President Reagan announced on September 16, 1983, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian use, free of charge, once completed in order to avert similar navigational errors in the future. Furthermore, the interface of the autopilot used on large airliners was modified to make it more obvious whether it is operating in HEADING mode or INS mode.
  Alvin Snyder, the director of worldwide television for the United States Information Agency, was the producer of the video shown to the U.N. Security Council on September 6, 1983. In an article in The Washington Post on September 1, 1996, he stated that he had been given only limited access to the transcripts of the Soviet communication when he produced the video in 1983. When he received full insight into the Soviet transmissions in 1993, he says he realised that: "The Russians (sic) believed the plane to be an RC-135 reconnaissance plane" and that "Osipovich (the Soviet fighter pilot) could not identify the plane" and "That he fired warning cannon shots and tipped his wings, an international signal to force the plane to land". Some of these statements were contradicted by the pilot in an interview with The New York Times, in which he confirmed that he did fire warning shots, but that they would not have been visible as they were not tracers.
  In a March 15, 2001, interview, Valery Kamensky, then Commander of the Soviet Far East Military District Air Defense Force and direct superior to General Kornukov, opined that such a shootdown of a civilian passenger plane could not happen again in view of the changing political c
caption: "The Tower of Prayer", a monument to KAL 007 at Cape Sōya, Japan
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