Letters to the Editor
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Another shootdowns
The downing of KAL flight 007 in 1983 was not the first shooting down of a Korean airliner by a Soviet interceptor. There was an earlier incident in April of 1978, when a KAL Boeing 707 was shot down near Murmansk. In that occasion, the pilot was able to belly-land the damaged plane on a frozen lake. All the passengers survived, except for two who were killed when the air-to-air missile hit the wing of the 707, sending shrapnel into the fuselage.
The 1978 and 1983 incidents were both in a grey area between accident and massacre. In 1983, for instance, the Soviet pilot (flying a Su-15 fighter) was low on fuel, he had failed to inform his ground controller that he was following a civilian jet (although he knew it himself), the KAL jet was 90 seconds from "escaping" back into international airspace, and the ground controller had to make a quick decision: if he let the KAL plane get away after it had overflown strategic installations, he risked facing the wrath of the Soviet government. So he chose to follow military protocol, which said that intruder aircraft that did not land were to be shot down. It's probably correct to assume that if the case had been put to the top Soviet leadership and they knew it was a civilian airliner, they would have realized that the political cost of shooting it down was greater than the military cost of letting it go.
The incident was driven by a specific pattern of decision-making, which was itself grounded in the Cold War policy of giving local-level military commanders leeway in identifying and dealing with local-level threats. In Cuba, Soviet commanders even had authorization to use nuclear weapons against a potential American invasion, after all. Tt is perhaps unlikely that an F-16 that intercepts an errant airliner today would be allowed to open fire without an ok from the President. But can we count on that when the response time has to be measured in minutes or seconds? Might the airline make a difference? If I was a passenger on, say, an Emirates or Saudia jet that had strayed into restricted airspace over Washington DC, and I saw an F-16 outside my window, I would be very nervous indeed.