Aboard Flight 902: "We Survived!"

After a scary ride, a happy -and lucky -landing

We'll probably never know exactly what happened," says a U.S. Defense official of the forced landing of Korean Air Lines' wayward Flight 902 after it had blundered into Soviet airspace on the night of April 20. Indeed, the full story of how the errant Paris-to-Anchorage-to-Seoul polar flight came to be fired upon over the strategic Kola Peninsula will probably be known only to the Soviets. But parts of the picture have begun to emerge, both from U.S. intelligence sources and from the 106 passengers and those crew members who finally were returned home early last week. The pilot and the navigator, who had been detained longer for interrogation, pleaded guilty "to violating the U.S.S.R.'s airspace," but were later pardoned by the Soviets and freed.

To Washington, the most intriguing aspect of the episode was the apparent sloppiness of Soviet air defenses on the Kola Peninsula, the site of a large naval base (at Murmansk) and important missile installations. The high-flying (35,000 ft.) Korean 707 should have been spotted by Soviet radar when it was as many as 500 miles offshore. Yet it not only flew unchallenged through the 200-mile-wide air defense zone that the Soviets maintain off their shores, but charged along for at least 18 minutes over Russian territory before fighters intercepted it.

When the Soviet interceptorshalf a dozen hot, 1,800-m.p.h. Sukhoi-15s -approached the 707, their pilots apparently did not know what to do. Radio contact was never established. None of the standard international signals to land, such as lowering wheels and turning on landing lights, were given. Instead, U.S. officials say, one of the Sukhoi-15s fired two missiles at the plane; the first hit above the left wing, while the second missed entirely. The attack killed a Korean businessman and a Japanese tourist and depressurized the fuselage, forcing the pilot, Captain Kim Chang Kyu, to begin a steep dive to an altitude of 3,000 ft.

At this point, according to U.S. intelligence experts who monitored the Soviet radio traffic, the Sukhoi-15 flyers evidently lost track of the 707 altogether. Indeed, the Soviet pilots radioed their base that the plane had been shot down. Eventually, reported Copilot Cha Soon Do, one of the interceptors reappeared ahead of the 707 in what seemed to be a "follow me" position. The Koreans tried to comply, but could not: the lead-footed Russian roared off too fast.

After that, the Koreans meandered over the moonlit countryside, to burn off fuel and find a place to come down. "We attempted to land three times in grainfields or along roads," Cha said. "But we could not, because of obstructing hills and high-tension wires." Finally, with fuel running out after 90 minutes of searching, Kim decided to set down on a frozen lake near the town of Kem and gamble that the ice would support his plane's 100-ton weight. The 707 slid to a stop just short of a hill at the lake's edge. Kim shouted: "We have survived!" and the passengers burst into applause. Two hours later, the first Soviet troops appeared.

Why were the Russian pilots so trigger-happy? Western experts speculate that the Soviets might have been more than normally jittery about security in the Kola Peninsula area because of an embarrassing incident that occurred a few weeks earlier: a light plane flown by a daredevil Swedish pilot landed on a lake near Leningrad to pick up three would-be Soviet defectors; although the rendezvous failed, the pilot managed to fly away scot-free.

How could Kim, 46, a veteran pilot with military experience, stray off course on a run he had flown many times? At least one alert passenger, Kishio Ohtani, a Tokyo camera-shop owner, realized that something was amiss when the Arctic sun, which had been on the plane's right side while it was on course to Alaska, suddenly appeared on the left. According to Ohtani, after the landing Kim explained to several passengers that he began to feel that his compass had gone awry and that his plane had reversed course about four hours out of Paris. When he saw an island that he knew he would not see if he were on course, he started turning around. Just then, the Soviet interceptors appeared.

Russian officials have tried to counter charges of hip shooting by Soviet pilots by insisting that the 707 had taken evasive action "for more than two hours" before it was forced down. Meanwhile, Korean Air Lines announced that henceforth only new DC-10 jumbo jets would be used on the Seoul-Paris run. The DC-10 is equipped with a sophisticated inertial navigation system that is almost foolproof. qed

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