'Strong echoes’ of 1983 Korean plane tragedy
25 July 2014 4:52 AM IST
The downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine has stirred memories of a 1983 incident when a Korean passenger jet was shot down by Soviet fighters in what then US president Ronald Reagan called a mid-air ‘massacre’.
As with the Malaysian plane, the loss of life was total, with all 269 passengers and crew aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 perishing when the stricken aircraft plunged into the Sea of Japan.
The similarities between the two disasters are striking.
Both involved aircraft from Asian airlines that were brought down by military weaponry in strikes that were directly or indirectly blamed on Russia.
And both came at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow, that fuelled angry exchanges over responsibility and hampered the resulting salvage operation and accident investigation.
And, to some extent, the personal tragedy of the hundreds of innocent lost lives was overshadowed by the subsequent blame game and the wider geo-political considerations that coloured the international community’s response. The downing of KAL 007 in September 1983 coincided with a surge in tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, which Ronald Reagan had denounced just months before as an ‘evil empire’.
Reagan had also just announced the space-based Strategic Defence Initiative, dubbed ‘Star Wars’ by the mainstream media, which Moscow saw as a dangerous and destabilising shift in the nuclear balance between the two super-powers.
Cold War tensions
Some Cold War experts say tensions rose to a level not seen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the highly charged atmosphere was seen as a major contributor to the Korean Air Lines disaster.
KAL 007 was on the last leg of a flight from New York to Seoul, via Alaska.
Although the precise sequence of events is still contested, it is clear that the plane veered off its intended flight path into Soviet airspace.
International investigators concluded the intrusion was accidental, the result of the autopilot being set in an incorrect mode.
The Soviet air force scrambled two Sukhoi Su-15 fighter jets to intercept the airliner and, in a 1998 interview with CNN, one of the pilots Gennadi Osipovich, described what happened next.
As with the Malaysian plane, the loss of life was total, with all 269 passengers and crew aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 perishing when the stricken aircraft plunged into the Sea of Japan.
The similarities between the two disasters are striking.
Both involved aircraft from Asian airlines that were brought down by military weaponry in strikes that were directly or indirectly blamed on Russia.
And both came at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow, that fuelled angry exchanges over responsibility and hampered the resulting salvage operation and accident investigation.
And, to some extent, the personal tragedy of the hundreds of innocent lost lives was overshadowed by the subsequent blame game and the wider geo-political considerations that coloured the international community’s response. The downing of KAL 007 in September 1983 coincided with a surge in tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, which Ronald Reagan had denounced just months before as an ‘evil empire’.
Reagan had also just announced the space-based Strategic Defence Initiative, dubbed ‘Star Wars’ by the mainstream media, which Moscow saw as a dangerous and destabilising shift in the nuclear balance between the two super-powers.
Cold War tensions
Some Cold War experts say tensions rose to a level not seen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the highly charged atmosphere was seen as a major contributor to the Korean Air Lines disaster.
KAL 007 was on the last leg of a flight from New York to Seoul, via Alaska.
Although the precise sequence of events is still contested, it is clear that the plane veered off its intended flight path into Soviet airspace.
International investigators concluded the intrusion was accidental, the result of the autopilot being set in an incorrect mode.
The Soviet air force scrambled two Sukhoi Su-15 fighter jets to intercept the airliner and, in a 1998 interview with CNN, one of the pilots Gennadi Osipovich, described what happened next.
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