Korean Air Flight 902
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Korean Air Flight 902 (KAL902, KE902) was the flight number of a civilian airliner shot down by Soviet fighters on April 20, 1978 near Murmansk, after it violated Soviet airspace and failed to respond to Soviet interceptors. Two passengers were killed in the accident. 107 passengers and crew survived after the plane made an emergency landing on a frozen lake.
The Boeing 707 aircraft (registration HL7429), piloted by Kim Chang Ky, departed from Paris, France on a course to Anchorage, Alaska, where it intended to refuel and proceed to Seoul, South Korea. The aircraft was not fitted with an inertial navigation system, and 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 north from Great Britain towards Iceland, arcing around Scandinavia and towards the Barents Sea into Soviet airspace. Sukhoi Su-15 'Flagon' fighter jets were scrambled after the plane, which was identified as a military U.S. plane (RC-135, which 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. He fired a single rocket, which caused heavy damage to part of the left wing and punctured the fuselage, causing rapid decompression and killing two of the 97 passengers. After the hit the Korean Air 902 was still able to continue its flight. At 23:05, after 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 south of Murmansk and 20 miles from the Finland border. The 107 survivors were rescued by Russian helicopters.
The passengers were released after 2 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.
An almost identical act would be repeated five years later by Korean Air Flight 007. What looked like established pattern of odd navigational errors leading to deep violations of the Soviet airspace and loss of human life proved to be an embarrassment to KAL and led to conspiracy theories, alleging that the company is a U.S. intelligence asset, being used for spy missions.
