The Mystery of Flight 902

Why did a South Korean jet make a 180DEG turn over the Arctic?

Everything was normal at the start of Korean Air Lines Flight 902, which left Paris one afternoon last week on the polar route to Seoul with 110 passengers and crew members aboard. Under a veteran pilot, Captain Kim Chang Kyu, 46, the Boeing 707 followed a normal course over the North Sea and Greenland and headed toward Canada's Ellesmere Island on its 8,455-mile run. But then, about 3 1/2 hours away from a refueling stop at Anchorage, Alaska, Captain Kim did something extraordinary: he made a 180DEG turn back toward Europe.

Hours later, Norwegian radar screens picked up the scramble of Soviet fighter-interceptors as the South Korean plane intruded on Russian airspace near the Kola Peninsula, which lies to the east of Finland. By that time, Captain Kim had activated his "7700" on-board distress signal.

According to the Soviet news agency Tass, the plane entered Soviet airspace northeast of Murmansk and was intercepted by Soviet fighters from the area's anti-aircraft defense system. For two hours, said Tass, the airliner ignored their orders to land. Premier Aleksei Kosygin was quoted as saying that the Korean jet took "evasive action" instead, in a vain attempt to get away. Finally, reported Tass, the plane came down and landed on a frozen lake near the town of Kem in the Karelian republic. Two passengers were killed and 13 injured, Kosygin told the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and a wing of the plane was severely damaged.

With U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in the middle of his mission to Moscow and with the revived SALT negotiations under way, neither the Americans nor the Russians seemed eager to make too much of the incident. Next day the Soviet government, which does not have diplomatic relations with Seoul, invited the U.S. to send a civil airliner to Murmansk to pick up the Korean plane's passengers and crew.

A Pam Am jetliner was chartered, flew to Murmansk and brought out to Helsinki the bodies of the two passengers who died in the incident and the surviving crew and passengers, except for the ill-fated flight's captain and navigator. Those two the Russians detained for further questioning on why the plane had ventured so far off course and into Soviet airspace. The Kola Peninsula is a highly sensitive military area for the Soviet Union. Not only is Murmansk the home port for Russia's northern fleet, but there are an estimated 900,000 soldiers and airmen based on the peninsula. Since the Soviets not only had the two key crewman but also the Korean airliner and its "black box" of tapes that record a plane's functioning throughout a flight, it might be some time before all of the mysteries were cleared up.

But the survivors interviewed in Helsinki were of some help, particularly in reporting that the Soviet account of the incident, which suggested the casualties and damage to the plane were caused by the lake landing, was not the whole truth. In fact, when the jetliner refused to respond to the Russian interceptors' signals, the Soviets had opened fire on the Korean craft. It was their bullets that killed the two passengers and damaged the plane, forcing it to land on the frozen lake near Kem, a landing one passenger described as perfect. After the landing, Captain Kim told his passengers that his instruments had failed and that he had made the mistake of trusting them rather than, presumably, his own experienced judgment that he was off course. In Helsinki, a Korean airline spokesman confirmed that the error was caused by "trouble with the navigational equipment," but precisely what that trouble was awaits the result of the Soviet investigation.

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