Word: hokkaido
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Above all, he is very lucky even to be Prime Minister. Pundits and polls alike had predicted a respectable victory for Yasuhiro Nakasone and his Liberal Democrats, so the news last week sent a shokku from the southern tip of Kyushu to northern Hokkaido. When the ballots were counted for the 511-member lower house of parliament, the L.D.P. had failed to win a majority, only the third time that has happened since the party came to power in 1955. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats' loss of 36 seats, from 286 to 250, was the largest they had ever suffered...
...ground, at the Wakkanai radar installation on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, and probably elsewhere in the area, voice-activated tape recorders chronicled the unfolding drama. The transcript of the air-to-ground conversations, made public last week, is excerpted and explained below. The chronology is in Greenwich Mean Time (G.M.T.), using a 24-hour clock (1800 hours, for example, means 6 p.m. G.M.T. and 2 p.m. E.D.T.). Although the full transcript shows four planes in contact with ground controllers, only two closed in for the kill. The number 805 identifies the pilot of the Su-15 who shot down...
...minutes later, a Soviet flyer radioed that the 747 was just short of that altitude, at 10,000 meters (33,300 ft.). About the same time, Japanese radar operators in Hokkaido noted that, although Flight 007 had ust reported its position as 115 miles south of Hokkaido, they found no corresponding radar blip there. They did spot one 115 miles north of the island...
Then, at 2:26 p.m., the whirling tape recorders, probably at the Japanese Defense Agency's massive radar installation in the otherwise sleepy town of Wakkanai on Hokkaido's northern tip, caught the incriminating conversations between a single Soviet fighter pilot and his unemotional commander on the ground. As reported in the Japanese press, the key transmissions included...
...warned outsiders away from their search of the area where the plane went down. The U.S. moved five F-15 jet fighters from Okinawa to northern Japan, but did not send them into the area. The U.S. Air Force also dispatched at least one AW ACS surveillance plane to Hokkaido. In the tense situation, both superpowers raised their alert status in the region, but no one wanted to provoke yet another air tragedy...