Korean Air Lines Flight 007 - Aftermath

Aftermath

The FAA temporarily closed Airway R-20, the air corridor that Korean Air Flight 007 was meant to follow, on September 2. Airlines fiercely resisted the closure of this popular route, the shortest of five corridors spanning Alaska and the Far East. It was therefore reopened on October 2 after safety and navigational aids were checked.

NATO had decided, under the impetus of the Reagan administration, to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in West Germany. This deployment would have placed missiles just 6–10 minutes striking distance from Moscow. Support for the deployment was wavering and it looked doubtful that it would be carried out. When the Soviet Union shot down Flight 007, the U.S. was able to galvanize enough support at home and abroad to enable the deployment to go ahead.

The unprecedented disclosure of the communications intercepted by the United States and Japan revealed a considerable amount of information about their intelligence systems and capabilities. National Security Agency director Lincoln D. Faurer commented: "...as a result of the Korean Air Lines affair, you have already heard more about my business in the past two weeks than I would desire...For the most part this has not been a matter of unwelcome leaks. It is the result of a conscious, responsible decision to address an otherwise unbelievable horror." Changes that the Soviets subsequently made to their codes and frequencies reduced the effectiveness of this monitoring by 60%.

The U.S. KAL 007 Victims' Association, under the leadership of Hans Ephraimson-Abt, successfully lobbied U.S. Congress and the airline industry to accept an agreement that would ensure that future victims of airline accidents would be compensated quickly and fairly by increasing compensation and lowering the burden of proof of airliner misconduct. This legislation has had far reaching effects for the victims of subsequent aircraft disasters.

The U.S. decided to utilize military radars to extend air traffic control radar coverage from 200 miles (320 km) to 1,200 miles (1,900 km) out from Anchorage. FAA also established a secondary radar system (ATCBI-5) on Saint Paul Island. In 1986, the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union set up a joint air traffic control system to monitor aircraft over the North Pacific, thereby giving the Soviet Union formal responsibility to monitor civilian air traffic, and setting up direct communication links between the controllers of the three countries.

Ronald Reagan announced on September 16, 1983, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian use, free of charge, once completed in order to avert similar navigational errors in future. Furthermore, the interface of the autopilot used on large airlines was modified to make it more obvious whether it is operating in mode or mode.

Alvin Snyder, the director of worldwide television for the United States Information Agency, was the producer of the video shown to the U.N. Security Council on September 6, 1983. In an article in Washington Post on September 1, 1996, he stated that he had been given only limited access to the transcripts of the Russian communication when he produced the video in 1983. When he received full insight into the Russian transmissions in 1993, he says he realised that: "The Russians believed the plane to be a RC-135 reconnaissance plane" and that "Osipovich (the Russian fighter pilot) could not identify the plane" and "That he fired warning cannons and tipped his wings, an international signal to force the plane to land". Some of these statements were contradicted by the pilot in an interview with The New York Times, in which he confirmed that he did fire warning shots, but that they would not have been visible as they were not tracers.

In a March 15, 2001, interview, Valeri Kamenski, then Commander of the Soviet Far East Military District Air Defense Force and direct superior to Gen. Kornukov, opined that such a shootdown of a civilian passenger plane could not happen again in view of the changing political conditions and alliances. In this interview, Kaminski stated, “It is still a mystery what happened to the bodies of the crew and passengers on the plane. According to one theory, right after the rocket’s detonation, the nose and tail section of the jumbo fell off and the mid fuselage became a sort of wind tunnel so the people were swept through it and scattered over the surface of the ocean. Yet in this case, some of the bodies were to have been found during the search operations in the area. The question of what actually happened to the people has not been given a distinct answer.”

On Sept. 1, 2003, commenting in a 20th anniversary of the shootdown article in RIA Novesti, Mikhail Prozumentshchikov, Deputy Director of the Russian State Archives of Recent History disclosed that the Soviet naval forces in the search for KAL 007 in international waters, already "knew better where had been downed" while conducting their search, and that nothing was found "especially as the USSR was not particularly interested."