Word: rc
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...over northeastern El Salvador, U.S. OV-1B MOhawk and RU-21J Beechcraft reconnaissance aircraft based in nearby Palmerola, Honduras, are conducting discreet surveillance missions. The flights, manned by pilots from the U.S. 224th Military Intelligence Battalion, have been under way since last month. Supplementing similar missions by longer-range RC-130 reconnaissance aircraft from Howard Air Force Base in Panama, the flights are intended to help fend off an anticipated increase in guerrilla activity as the March 25 election approaches. For the Reagan Administration, the Honduras-based forays have another advantage: they do not violate the self-imposed U.S. limit...
...American intelligence people now reconstruct the event, Soviet radar at first did erroneously identify the plane as an American RC-135 (a reconnaissance version of the Boeing 707). An RC-135 had been in the North Pacific earlier that night. Though the Soviets tracked KAL 007 with radar for more than two hours, it is now believed that their interceptors had trouble finding the airliner. Not until it was about to leave Soviet airspace did they finally bring it into sight, and then they had to make a quick decision. They shot...
...should have. The Times story asserts that the interceptor pilot probably fired two air-to-air missiles from behind and below the jet, a position from which he could not readily have identified the distinctive shape of a Boeing 747. Perhaps, but a 747 is much bigger than an RC-135. Tapes of the pilots' conversation also indicate that the jet showed flashing navigation and strobe lights, not a common characteristic of spy planes...
...hundred feet--the KAL plane was, of course, at over 30,000 feet), and thus that the plane could not have been spying, for this is not the issue. Nor is the issue the true incompetence of Russia's air defenses which failed to tell the difference between an RC-135 (Boeing 707) spy plane and a 747 commercial jetliner, and which so botched the issue that by the time Russian jets finally intercepted the slow-moving plane after it had meandered for more than two and a half hours in sensitive Russian airspace, it was almost in international airspace...
...sophisticated equipment, which would require visible changes in the shape of the jet and the addition of large antennas, a high-altitude flight at night by a 747 would have little use in reconnaissance. Such a mission would be worthless from the U.S. standpoint, since American satellites and the RC-135s provide far more detailed intelligence than any modified 747 could. The U.S. has never sent out a 747 on a spy mission, Air Force sources insist. Korean President Chun Doo Hwan was vehement in his denial of the spying charge. Said he: "Nobody on earth but the Soviet authorities...