Word: jumbos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pilot sends out an IFF (Identification: Friend or Foe) radio signal to Flight 007 to see if it is a friendly Soviet plane. But the Su-15's IFF frequency can be picked up only by Soviet aircraft. The jumbo hums westward into the darkness, unaware that it is being interrogated...
...while fast for a commercial airplane, is no match for the supersonic Su-15. The jumbo's typical cruising speed is 540 m.p.h.; the Soviet fighter is capable of speeds in excess of 1,400 m.p.h. Pilot 805 correctly assumes he will not need to use his afterburner (a device that sprays fuel into a jet's hot exhaust, giving it a sudden burst of speed) in order to catch up to the lumbering jetliner...
...pilot of the Su-15 decides (or is told by ground control) that he needs to get closer to the target. He accelerates and gets within a little more than a mile of the jumbo jet, which remains oblivious to the danger. Simultaneously, he turns off his weapons' lock-on system so that he can reposition it properly later, when he is ready to fire. Once again, he reports to the ground that 007's strobe light is blinking...
...journey that was to end in death and crisis began unportentously at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The gleaming white Boeing 747-200B jumbo jet, trimmed in red and blue and bearing Korean Air Lines' sleek symbolic bird on its towering 63-ft.-high tail, lumbered routinely away from Gate 15. Due to leave at 11:50 p.m. E.D.T. on Tuesday, Flight 007 was 35 minutes late taking...
...about noon (E.D.T.) that day, when Flight 007 was cruising southwestward over the Bering Sea, and would follow the plane for the next 2½ fateful hours. As always, U.S. and Japanese intelligence stations were in effect watching the Soviets as they watched the jumbo jet. The stations did so by recording the radio communications between the Soviet radar operators, probably located in northern Kamchatka, and their superiors along the military chain of command. It would be many hours later before those tapes would be examined and their significance determined...