Mayday Air Crash Investigations - S09 E05 - Target Is Destroyed
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00:0035,000 feet above the sea of Japan.
00:14Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.
00:17We're experiencing rapid decompression.
00:20Descent to 10,000.
00:22The pilots have lost control of their plane.
00:25V-brake is coming out.
00:27A 747 with 269 people on board plunges towards the sea.
00:34Within hours, the story began circulating in Washington
00:37that the Soviets had been involved.
00:40This shocking incident escalates tension
00:42between two bitter rivals.
00:45The investigation is mired in secrecy and deception.
00:50It's up to investigators to find the answer
00:54before the crash of a passenger jet leads to an all-out war.
01:03Nader, nader.
01:04Nader.
01:05Nader.
01:06Nader.
01:07Nader.
01:08Nader.
01:10Nader.
01:11Nader.
01:12Nader.
01:13Nader.
01:14Nader.
02:15Emergency defense, put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.
02:22Emergency defense, put the mask over your nose and adjust the headband.
02:24It's just after 2 in the morning aboard KAL flight 007.
02:34Korean Air 007, position over Nipi, estimating NOCA 1826132.0.
02:41After a brief layover in Anchorage, a Korean Airlines 747 is on its way to Seoul.
02:51The marathon flight originated in New York 13 hours ago.
02:57Captain Chun Byung-in has nearly 11 years' experience flying for Korean Airlines.
03:02Before that, he served 10 years in the Korean Air Force.
03:09This leg of the flight is a 6,100-kilometer journey over the North Pacific.
03:14Once the plane is in the air, there is very little for the pilots to do.
03:21Ladies and gentlemen, we'll soon be serving breakfast before we land in Kimpo, which will be in about 3 hours.
03:28Many of the passengers plan to take connecting flights to other destinations after landing in Seoul.
03:38Mary Jane Hendry is heading to Japan to start a new life.
03:45My sister Mary Jane found a job, and she'd gotten hired by this Kara company.
03:52She was exactly the kind of person that they needed for their company in Tokyo.
03:58So she was leaving to embark on this new stage of her career.
04:06Just 15 minutes behind them is the plane's sister flight, KAL 015.
04:12Korean Air 007.
04:19Go ahead, Korean Air 015.
04:21What are you doing?
04:23The flight crews chat to help pass the time.
04:26Go see the leaves.
04:30We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.
04:33How much of a tailwind?
04:3535 knots from 040.
04:43In an effort to conserve fuel, the crew decides to take the plane to a higher altitude.
04:51Tokyo Center, Korean Air 007.
04:55Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
04:58Korean Air 007, request climb 350.
05:02Roger, stand by.
05:03Stand by.
05:15Korean Air 007, climb and maintain flight level 350.
05:22Roger, Korean Air 007, climb and maintain flight level 350.
05:26Then, without warning, the plane is out of control.
05:42Grab it.
05:46Turret bottles.
05:47The crew extends the landing gear in an effort to stop the plane from climbing.
06:06Altitude is going up.
06:09Altitude is going up.
06:11Altitude is going up.
06:13Speed brake is coming out.
06:15I can't descend.
06:17This isn't working.
06:19This isn't working.
06:20This isn't working.
06:22Engines are normal, sir.
06:25Is it rapid decompression?
06:28Tokyo Center, Korean Air 007.
06:29Tokyo Center, Korean Air 007.
06:30Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
06:32We are experiencing rapid decompression descent to 10,000.
06:34Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.
06:36Radio check on 10048.
06:38Stand by.
06:39Stand by.
06:41Stand by.
06:42Stand by.
06:43Stand by.
06:44Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
06:45Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
06:46We are experiencing rapid decompression descent to 10,000.
06:49Korean Air 007, unreadable, unreadable.
06:52Radio check on 10048.
06:55Stand by.
06:56Stand by.
06:57Stand by.
06:58Stand by.
06:59Stand by.
07:01Okay.
07:03Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
07:05Korean Air 007, Tokyo.
07:06Korean Air Lines Flight 007, and all 269 people on board, have vanished.
07:34Korean Air 005, would you attempt to contact Korean Air 007, please, and relay position?
07:42All efforts to contact the flight have failed.
07:48Tokyo makes calls to other radar stations in Japan and Korea.
07:53I cannot contact Korean Air 007.
07:55A call is even made to a radar facility in the Soviet Union.
07:58Relatives nervously await news of the missing flight.
08:05The 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.
08:21There 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.
08:36As the world waits for news about the incident, U.S. military officials make a horrible discovery.
08:43At a top-secret surveillance facility, they've been monitoring Soviet transmissions.
08:50It appears the unthinkable has happened.
08:53At the time of the flight's disappearance, U.S. soldiers heard what they thought was a routine Soviet training mission.
09:02It doesn't seem possible that the Soviets would actually shoot down a passenger plane.
09:22But American officials have little doubt.
09:24The next morning, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz delivers an unusually blunt statement.
09:33The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack.
09:37Loss of life appears to be heavy.
09:40We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.
09:45It couldn't be. It just, it couldn't be. How could they all just perish? What do you mean?
09:51There must have been a reason.
09:561983 is the height of the Cold War.
10:00Russia and much of Eastern Europe are united by communist ideology.
10:05Ruled with an iron fist, the Soviet Union is locked in a bitter political struggle with the West.
10:10Relations were bad, but no one really knew how bad, how dangerously bad they were.
10:18Initially, Soviet officials deny responsibility for the KAL disaster.
10:24The story came out of Moscow was that the plane appeared, we intercepted it, tried to make it stop.
10:30It didn't, it flew away. That was the first story.
10:32But soon they reverse course and come clean.
10:36A Soviet fighter jet did, in fact, shoot the plane down.
10:41But they insist the attack was justified.
10:44The Soviet view was that it was on a spy mission, perhaps carrying instruments, cameras, recorders and so forth.
10:52The Soviet Union claims Flight 007 entered highly restricted airspace under orders from the U.S. government.
10:59But the U.S. insists KAL 007 was a routine passenger flight.
11:10The dispute only heightens political tension.
11:12In terms of an actual shooting war, 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.
11:29The KAL disaster would put NATO nuclear disarmament talks in jeopardy.
11:36The Soviets would ultimately walk away.
11:40The nuclear threat is growing.
11:44Under such circumstances, the need for an impartial inquiry is urgent.
11:48The U.N. calls on the International Civil Aviation Organization.
11:51KAL offers a neutral investigation, an investigation team that can deal with all parties involved in a neutral way.
12:03Kai Frostell joins the international team of investigators that will try to uncover the truth behind the destruction of Flight 007.
12:11With two superpowers squaring off, they're under pressure to find answers and find them fast.
12:24KAL 007's flight plan should have kept it well away from Soviet airspace.
12:30Either it was shot down over international waters, or the flight had strayed off course, figuring out which is the first priority for investigators.
12:43But they face a huge obstacle.
12:46The plane's black boxes are still missing.
12:50The lack of flight recorders, data recorder, cockpit voice recorder, that's significant in an investigation.
12:57The Americans join forces with South Korea and Japan in the search for the crucial devices.
13:04But the three allied nations are not the only ones searching.
13:08On 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.
13:19It's a race to find the black boxes.
13:22The Americans know they may never get the truth if the Soviets find the boxes first.
13:28Each side accuses the other of dirty tricks.
13:33The US did formally complain that the Soviets would either sail across US ships, that they would drop false pingers to deflect listening devices away from the true pinger.
13:44The Soviets claim Flight 007 was flying in Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island when they shot it down.
13:55If that's true, the aircraft was well outside its designated aerial corridor, a route known as R-20.
14:03Across the North Pacific, there are various routes that are labeled that R-20 was the one closest to Soviet airspace.
14:12The Red Route 1 was a nickname for it. It was the one closest.
14:16So it was known to be, or should have been known to be, a route that you took extra precautions on.
14:23Investigators get their first hint that if the crew was flying in restricted airspace, they didn't know it.
14:29The corners they were reporting, they put them on course.
14:36The Tokyo air traffic controller who last communicated with Flight 007 tells investigators that all seemed normal.
14:43The crew reported they were flying the R-20 route.
14:58But as with every other flight over the Pacific, 007 was beyond Tokyo's radar range.
15:05The controller could only rely on the pilots to verify their position.
15:09Perhaps they were mistaken about where they were.
15:14That possibility becomes more likely when investigators talk to the crew of the Korean Airlines flight that was just minutes behind Flight 007.
15:27Tell me about the exchange with Flight 007.
15:29The captain of the second flight recounts an odd conversation with the 007 crew.
15:37We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.
15:40How much of a tailwind?
15:4335 knots, 040.
15:45We still have a 15 knot headwind.
15:50Could he be getting a headwind if he was here?
15:53It would be almost impossible for one flight to have a tailwind and the other a headwind.
15:59Something doesn't add up.
16:02But with the black box still missing, investigators have no way of knowing where KAL 007 actually was at the time of that exchange.
16:10That made it very difficult in the way that we had no direct information that I would normally have as an accident investigators.
16:25Frostell gets more information from an unlikely source.
16:31The US military.
16:35In a rare move, US officials share highly classified surveillance data from the night of the shoot down.
16:41A top secret technology called passive radar contract the movements of every military and civilian plane around the globe.
16:58What it reveals about KAL 007 is stunning.
17:03The plane was way off course.
17:04For almost its entire journey across the Pacific, the flight had been drifting north.
17:11By the time it was shot down, flight 007 was 560 kilometers or 350 miles north of where it should have been.
17:21And had already flown in and out of Soviet territory.
17:25The Soviets were telling the truth.
17:26And then it becomes a question of determining why was it off course that much.
17:34To find the answer, investigators turned their attention to the navigation system on board the 747.
17:41It's called INS, the inertial navigation system.
17:45The 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.
17:54Very accurate. It would get you where you want it to be.
17:57The system relies on coordinates, or waypoints, entered into the flight controller.
18:03The way it works is that there is nine waypoints that you put in.
18:10That's the way you program it.
18:12Five nine degrees, one eight point zero north.
18:17Waypoints are essentially GPS coordinates that also have one word names, like Bethel, Neva, or Nippy.
18:26Flight 007's INS should have been programmed to find and follow those electronic guideposts to Seoul.
18:33Five nine degrees, one eight point zero north.
18:37Eight point nine, turn on dating 270.
18:39Perhaps there was some last minute change in the flight plan.
18:44Kai Frostell listens to the pre-flight conversation between the crew and the tower in Alaska.
18:49Net at 473, turn right.
18:51Korean Air 007, climb and maintain flight level 310.
18:55Push. Net at 473, turn right.
18:58It was total routine from the beginning to the end.
19:01There was nothing exceptional with the takeoff or the taxiing to position the preparation for the flight.
19:10After leaving Anchorage, the 747 flew out over the Pacific just as planned.
19:17But it never made it to the first waypoint.
19:22Instead, it drifted off course for more than five hours.
19:27Hope of uncovering the reasons why begins to fade.
19:31A ten week effort to recover the flight recorders has turned up nothing.
19:36The search is called off.
19:38The actual aircraft, where it was and how many pieces it was, remained unknown.
19:51With the investigation stalled, Frostell turns to the plane's manufacturers.
19:56The US and Boeing offered to simulate the route that we knew Korean 007 had flown.
20:04We went over to Boeing in Seattle and then Boeing carried out the simulation.
20:10Waypoint number two. Five, nine degrees, one, eight...
20:16Retracing flight 007's steps in a simulator leaves them with a few possibilities.
20:21One is that a mistake was made while entering the coordinates into the INS.
20:28Six zero degrees, four seven point one north.
20:34Normally the co-pilot would insert the waypoints and the captain would check that the correct digits have been put in.
20:45Six zero degrees, four seven point one north, check.
20:50Miss programming the INS at the gate could have taken the plane over the Soviet Union.
20:56Okay, let's try the flight in heading mode now.
20:59A second, less likely possibility is that after programming the waypoint navigation system, the crew may have failed to turn it on.
21:10After takeoff from Anchorage, the aircraft would have used a constant magnetic heading to get to the route.
21:22It's a standard procedure to begin a flight using a magnetic compass heading for direction.
21:28Soon after takeoff, pilots must activate the navigation system so it can lock on to the first waypoint.
21:34And if it was forgotten in that constant magnetic heading, it would continue over Soviet airspace.
21:45The magnetic heading would have kept the plane flying in the right direction, but along a very different route than the one planned.
21:56Captain Chun was a distinguished pilot with years of experience.
22:01Forgetting to switch the autopilot to INS mode would have been an astonishing error.
22:10At this point, Frostell can only speculate why flight 007 was off course.
22:14But what's even harder to understand is why the Soviet Union would risk starting a war by shooting a plane down.
22:24The Soviets resorted to deadly force to punish this intruder.
22:28It's like shooting the paper boy in your front yard at night because you think it might be breaking into your house.
22:38What could prompt such a response from the Soviets?
22:41Investigators get their answer from the U.S. military.
22:48Though flight 007 may not have been on a spy mission that night, another plane was a U.S. Air Force RC-135.
22:57They 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.
23:10The spy plane was near the Soviet border in the path of the KAL jetliner.
23:15When their paths crossed, the two planes may have been indistinguishable on Soviet radar.
23:21When 007 came in over Soviet airspace, the Soviet Union assumed it's an RC-135.
23:31Along came this intruder, and they just fell into the patterns that they had prepared in advance for such an intruder.
23:38Upon violation of state border, approach targeted strike.
23:45But disturbing questions remain.
23:48Did the fighter pilot get close enough to see the target with his own eyes?
23:53Did he know it was a passenger jet?
24:00Requests to speak to fighter pilot Gennady Osipovich are refused.
24:06And for the time being at least, those questions are left unanswered.
24:12In December 1983, less than four months after the disaster, IKO releases the findings of the investigation.
24:25Though lacking hard evidence, the report concludes Flight 007 strayed into Soviet airspace by accident,
24:33due to pilot error in operating the navigation system.
24:36I would almost call it the best guess based on all the work and the factual information we had in 1983.
24:47For them to summarize that the plane was there by accident, as far as I'm concerned,
24:51that's not the answers we wanted to hear, and we believed that there was further investigation to do.
24:58The key to this mystery remains locked inside the plane's black boxes,
25:03which are assumed lost forever beneath the sea.
25:20In the months following the KL disaster,
25:23unidentifiable human remains wash ashore in northern Japan.
25:27Small pieces of wreckage are also found.
25:29Investigators have no doubt that the plane was completely destroyed.
25:38We don't know where their bodies lie.
25:41There was clothing that washed up on the shore, her ID washed up on the shore of Japan.
25:47Of course, getting that ID back was, at least we had something.
25:51Like the victims' families, investigators have no clear idea where Flight 007 went down.
26:02But there are some people who do.
26:04Top 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.
26:18It was a big pile of debris.
26:19They took down this pile with their bare hands until they found the black boxes.
26:23There were two of them.
26:24There were two of them.
26:25They also found the black boxes.
26:26They also found the all-important black boxes.
26:28They also found the all-important black boxes.
26:34It was a big pile of debris.
26:36They took down this pile with their bare hands until they found the black boxes.
26:41There were two of them.
26:42But the Soviets keep the boxes to themselves.
27:09The information is kept locked away.
27:22Until nearly ten years later.
27:27After the turn of the decade brings a jubilant end to the Cold War.
27:32Glasnost ushers in a new spirit of openness in Russia.
27:36Eager to break with the past, the new administration in Moscow decides to go public.
27:53The actual unveiling of the data recorders and black boxes was a total surprise.
28:02And suddenly this new material promised some real answers.
28:07So I knew they were going to tell me something.
28:10I wanted to have the facts from the tapes.
28:12And then see how does those facts compare to what we wrote in 1983.
28:17In 1992, during official ceremonies in Seoul, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin hands over the long-awaited flight recorders.
28:29I was approached by KGB General and he told me that you probably don't know me but I have had the recorders for ten years.
28:42I had them in the safe in my office.
28:45I knew it was a big international secret.
28:48It bothered me tremendously.
28:49Every day when I came to the office and I looked at my safe and I knew the recorders were there.
28:55He told me you may not understand that this is the happiest day in my life.
29:00Kai Frostell is asked to lead the new team of investigators based in Paris.
29:16And as a clear indication that the times have changed, Vladimir Kaufman, a Russian avionics expert, joins the team.
29:26At the time I was working at the Civil Institute of Aviation and was an air crash investigator.
29:41This was an international investigation of a very high level.
29:44Their first task is to make sure the black boxes are authentic.
29:58It 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.
30:06And so we had to 110% validate the authenticity of the tape.
30:14They had seals on them.
30:16I remember wax seals on them.
30:20The photographs were taken.
30:23The seals were cut.
30:25Investigators confirmed that the CVR handed over by the Russians is the same box that was installed on Flight 007.
30:33They opened them and looked at them and validated the serial numbers, validated the model numbers.
30:42Now that they know they have the right boxes, investigators need to make sure they have not been tampered with.
30:50Suspicion soon arises.
30:53During the cleaning process, they noted that there had been some breaks in the tape and had been spliced by the Russians.
31:02It is not uncommon for a tape to break during the impact of a crash.
31:07But distrust of the former Soviet Union runs deep.
31:10First they examined these areas of the splices, where it had broken, and they did that under this high magnification photograph.
31:20One of the techniques that the French had that I hadn't seen before, that wasn't used in the United States, was a photo analysis machine.
31:28They could do this with this optical high magnification. They could actually see the magnetic waves.
31:33The test confirms that no data was added or removed from the cockpit voice recorder when it was spliced together.
31:42565, what was the altimeter again?
31:45Finally, investigators can listen to the tape, confident that every word is authentic.
31:50What? It's already time for breakfast.
31:55What do you know?
31:57Let's eat later.
31:59Fine.
32:01But all they hear is idle banter from the crew.
32:05I heard there's a currency exchange at the airport.
32:09What kind of money?
32:11Dollars to Korean money.
32:13It's in the domestic building.
32:15There is not a word on the tape to suggest the crew was on a spy mission.
32:24It's a totally routine conversation, and either these guys are the most cold-blooded actors and falsifiers ever, or they really were totally clueless about where they were.
32:34Sadly, I think the latter's the case.
32:35It seems unlikely that KAL-007 was on a spy mission, but it was caught flying over Soviet territory.
32:52Investigators have long suspected that the crew either misprogrammed their navigation system, or left it in the wrong mode.
33:00Set on constant magnetic heading.
33:04The flight data recorder finally provides the definitive answer.
33:10The data revealed that the aircraft was on constant magnetic heading from soon after takeoff from Anchorage to the end.
33:20There was no deviation whatsoever in the magnetic heading.
33:24The crew of KAL-007 never activated the waypoint navigation system.
33:37Gear up.
33:39And gear up.
33:41Now passing 500.
33:43It seems they simply forgot a basic step in their standard flight procedure.
33:54The INS was functioning properly, had been loaded properly, and was counting along the route where it thought it was supposed to be.
34:03But the autopilot was not following the INS commands. Instead, it was following a compass mode.
34:08So it's only telling them where they're supposed to be.
34:14Investigators learned that even though the plane was following a compass heading and not the waypoints,
34:20the computer would have continued to display their intended waypoints even though the plane was nowhere near them.
34:27This may explain why the crew never noticed their mistake.
34:43The crew also didn't notice a key indication that they were badly off course.
34:48We're experiencing an unexpectedly strong tailwind.
34:52How much of a tailwind?
34:5435 knots. 040.
34:58The fact that they were experiencing completely different weather patterns to a plane supposedly minutes behind them should have alerted them to the problem.
35:06Now, there's a point where you see him teetering on the brink of realizing something is horribly wrong.
35:17He's talking to the pilot behind him, and the winds are almost 180 degrees apart.
35:21And there's a pause, and Shun is somewhere in his mind. He's a pilot, and he has the instinct, you know, this is odd.
35:30Is it a clue to something I should look into? And he doesn't.
35:36And at that point, he might as well pull the gun out and put it to his head.
35:39It 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.
35:53Everybody makes mistakes sooner or later. Good pilots make mistakes. Not-so-good pilots make mistakes. We're all making mistakes.
36:03When 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.
36:20The pilots believed they were on course. But three hours into the flight, their magnetic heading took them into Soviet airspace over Kamchatka.
36:28The Soviet military had been tracking a U.S. reconnaissance plane.
36:42There was a real American spy plane. It was there. There were two planes that looked alike.
36:48When KAL penetrated the border, the perception was that this was the plane.
36:52As the passengers sleep through their long journey, the Soviets scramble fighters to intercept the plane.
37:02The identity of the plane was just not known. The clues that it was a lost civilian airliner, well, might have been there.
37:10The clues that it was a 135 didn't add up. But the Soviets involved didn't have time to think it through.
37:16Target traveling at high speed and approaching border.
37:23But the fighters are not fast enough. The plane leaves Soviet airspace and continues along its heading to Seoul.
37:30They figured that they'd just been spooked. But that was all over. Unfortunately, for everyone involved, it wasn't.
37:41The airliner is just seconds from flying over the island of Sakhalin.
37:45So Sakhalin was prepared.
37:48KAL flight 007 enters Soviet airspace for the second time.
38:00Ladies and gentlemen, we'll soon be serving breakfast before we land in Kimpo, which will be in about three hours.
38:15Target traveling at high speed and approaching border.
38:19Target is on your headache.
38:22I can see it both visually and on the screen.
38:25Major Gennady Osipovic, the lead fighter, makes visual contact with flight 007.
38:37Give warning burst with cannon.
38:40But the warning shots go unnoticed.
38:48Take a position for attack.
38:49Take a position for attack.
38:59Approach target and destroy.
39:02Roger, locked on already.
39:05Executed locked.
39:06Target is locked.
39:33Target is destroyed.
39:34Target is destroyed.
39:37The fighter pilot believed the 747 was an enemy spy plane.
39:41It takes nearly a decade after he shot down KAL 007 for that pilot to tell his side of the story.
39:51Investigators have long wondered what Major Gennady Osipovic saw and did after he was ordered to intercept an intruding aircraft in 1983.
40:11After nearly ten years and the collapse of the communist regime, he finally tells his side of the story.
40:22I saw the plane. It did look like a civilian plane because there was a flashing light on its tail and one on the top.
40:29But 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.
40:39Give warning burst with cannon.
40:40When warning shots are fired, they usually include tracers, which are like flares and are easily seen.
40:53However, Osipovic had no tracers loaded in his cannon.
40:59They're supposed to load tracers, just no one had shipped them any for the last six months. So they weren't there.
41:04But even without the tracers, Osipovic thinks the 747 crew should have seen him.
41:13As I caught up with him, I was flying like this and he was flying like that. How could he not turn around and see me?
41:19I was flying with lights. Everything was according to protocol. He should have seen me.
41:25And then a horrible coincidence seals the fate of 269 people aboard the flight.
41:30Korean Air 007, request climb 350.
41:35Korean Air 007, climb and maintain flight level 350.
41:40Like a car going uphill, a climbing plane slows down.
41:45But to the fighter pilot following the 747, this is interpreted as an evasive maneuver.
41:53He decreased his speed so that I could either pass him or fall, one of the two.
41:58So that's how I knew that he's an enemy intruder.
42:02That convinced him that it was not a civilian plane and that he was in danger.
42:10My only thought was to catch and stop. This is what we were trained to do.
42:16I 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.
42:28He's running out of time because the airliner was approaching international waters.
42:33The warhead takes place.
42:34Take opposition to them.
42:35Rot, locked on already.
42:36It's a killer block.
42:38Osipovic fires two air to air missiles.
42:44They travel 2000 kilometers an hour towards the jet line.
42:48as an hour towards the jet line one of them explodes near the tail damaging vital controls
42:57and hydraulic lines the warhead also tears a hole in the fuselage causing a rapid decompression in
43:05the cabin i saw the first explosion right under the tail and that's it the lights of the trespasser
43:13went out and i went home in the time that they lost pressurization to a certain point indicated
43:29that the hole would have been approximately 1.75 square feet the crew managed to fly the crippled
43:37plane for several minutes immediately after the missile impact the aircraft climbed to flight
43:44level 380 and then it descended about 5 000 feet per minute
43:52the stricken jetliner plummeted towards the sea of japan
43:57with most of its passengers likely still conscious
43:59and that's when the recording stops
44:16our determination was that the airframe probably broke up at that point
44:30to this day gennady osipovich is convinced he shot down a spy plane
44:37i knew they wouldn't order me to intercept if it was a civilian plane or cargo plane
44:43only if it was a trespasser
44:47we weren't blaming him but some families did they certainly did they said it was his fault and he
44:53pressed the button and he shot them down and they were looking to blame somebody
44:57it was clear that he was living with what he had done and what he had done in order for him to live and
45:07to sleep was to believe that it was a spy plane there were no passengers on board that he had not killed 269
45:14people and that's the way he wants to believe it and i'm not going to blame him for wanting to believe that
45:20in 1993 kai frostell has the evidence that he sorely lacked when he issued his first report
45:32he can prove how the korean pilots blundered and ended up off course
45:36and how the soviet pilot interpreted the situation the destruction of flight 007 is ruled an accident
45:47frostell recommends that all passenger planes be equipped with a clear indicator that the autopilot is
45:53in heading mode the tragedy of 007 is that it didn't have to happen was not inevitable
46:03it was a series of accidents a series of misunderstandings a series of
46:09bad decisions that had been primed ahead of time
46:15when my sister mary jane said goodbye to me at the airport
46:18she hugged me so so tightly and i said mary jane i feel like i'm never going to see you again
46:29korean 007 has had a great effect on my life it has been close to my heart that has been very sad for
46:37me my sympathy and condolences all these years have gone out to the families
46:48so
46:57so
46:59so
47:01so