Word: kal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President John Kennedy or black civil rights fighter Martin Luther King, but everything is already known about the [airliner]." The outrageous implication was that U.S. secret services had staged all three tragedies and covered their tracks successfully in the Kennedy and King deaths, but had been caught sending KAL 007 on a spy flight...
...signal their presence. Indeed, one of the other revisions in the transcripts reveals the Su-15 pilot saying, "He still can't see me." Unfortunately, this created another ambiguity: Did the Soviet pilot mean that he had succeeded in avoiding detection, or that his efforts to signal the KAL 747 had been unavailing...
...when a Soviet fighter shot down KAL 007, killing all 269 passengers, the renascent détente in Washington was effectively stopped in its tracks. Thanks in just about equal parts to George Shultz's moderating influence and the lack of viable sanctions, Reagan's immediate response to the Soviet's brutal deed was mild: the usual harsh rhetoric coupled with some minor restrictions on cultural and diplomatic exchange. But despite the President's reaffirmation of his commitment to arms control, it is clear that this latest East-West crisis has been a boon to Reagan, slowing the nuclear freeze...
...could KAL Flight 007 stray so far off its proper course? The Boeing 747 was equipped with three Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), designed to keep the jet on its scheduled flight path and to back one another up in case of malfunctions. Their performance record is excellent: a new study shows that only about one flight in 10,000 strays 50 or more miles off course. In 90% of the cases, the deviation is attributed to pilot error. The INS computers are programmed by the crew at the start of the flight. The computers are fed the plane...
Could the Soviets have mistaken their target for a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance plane that had been on a mission in the region near where the Korean jet went off course? Marshal Ogarkov reiterated the Soviet claim that the KAL plane was on a spy mission and flew in tandem with the RC-135 for ten minutes so that the blips of the two planes merged on Soviet radar screens. When they separated, he implied, the Soviets could not tell which was which. U.S. officials dismiss this scenario as ludicrous. The two planes, they say, passed each other 86 miles...