Korean Air lines Shoot down incident

Here is an interesting, but tragic incident happened during the Coldwar era.

A Korean Air Lines Flight 902 (KAL902, KE902), a civilian airliner was involved in a shooting incident on April 20, 1978 near Murmansk, after it violated Soviet airspace and failed to respond to Soviet interceptors.

The pilots of the plane had mysteriously altered the route and came deep inside the Russian territory. Two and a half hours they were escorted by Russian jets but did not respond to any radio contact or visual contact attempts by the Russians. At last the Soviet military commanders ordered to shoot the plane down with as much accuracy as they could do. The jet plane of Russian army hit the Boeing with a missile cutting off the piece of its wing, so the Korean plane had to land after this. Two passengers were killed others got wounds as a result of an extremely fast landing to the frozen Russian lake in Karelia, Russia near Kem’ town. 107 passengers and crew survived in the accident.

According to the official Korean explanation, the pilots in their navigation calculations used the wrong sign of magnetic declination when converting between magnetic and true headings. This caused the plane to fly in an enormous right-turning arc, which eventually caused the aircraft to fly into Soviet airspace. Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 'Flagon' fighters were scrambled after the plane, which was identified as a military U.S. plane (RC-135, an aircraft that shares common ancestry with the 707, like many other U.S. military airplanes).

According to Soviet reports, the intruder repeatedly ignored commands to follow the interceptors. Su-15 pilot Capt. A. Bosov was ordered to shoot it down after trying to convince his superiors on the ground that the aircraft was not a military threat. He fired a pair of R-60 missiles, one of which caused heavy damage to part of the left wing of the Boeing 707 and punctured the fuselage, causing rapid decompression, and killing two of the 97 passengers. After being hit, the airliner descended into cloud and was lost by the Su-15s. At 23:05, 40 minutes after the missile strike, it was finally forced by another SU-15TM (piloted by Anatoly Kerefov) to land on the frozen Korpijärvi Lake, 250 miles (400 km) south of Murmansk and 20 miles (32 km) from the Finland border. The 107 survivors were rescued by Russian helicopters.

The passengers were released after two days, while the crew were held for investigation and released after they made a formal apology. The Korean pilots acknowledged that they deliberately failed to obey the commands of the Soviet interceptors. The Soviet Union invoiced Korea for $100,000 in caretaking expenses. The passengers were flown with a Pan Am B727 from Murmansk to Helsinki, Finland from which another Korean Air B707 took them to Seoul.