Bump
When a South American Air Force bought one of the Korean Airlines’ 707s in the ‘80s, I was sent by my company as an instructor pilot to check out their three crews.
The KAL aircraft had 3 independent overwater nav systems - one each for the captain, copilot, and navigator. According to the KAL SOP (standard operating procedures), they were supposed to be independently programmed. However, they had a “Left / Right / Remote switch that could allow the Nav to program all three systems at once. I cautioned the Air Force guys to NEVER do this because an inadvertent error in setting the latitude/longitude would not be caught. They were good about never doing this.
For years, I wondered if the Koreans were, or did they just dump the programming on the Nav and hope that he did it correctly. Two transposed numbers could have put them right over Russian airspace...
To this day I still believe the Iranian pilot was hell bent on martyring everyone on board as he was on a glide path for the Vincennes.
Was it common for Su-15s to carry cannon in pods? This is the first I’ve heard that they could do that.
My family flew the same flight as KAL 007 on the 1-year anniversary of the shoot-down. LAX to Anchorage, then on to Seoul and ultimately to our destination of Tokyo for my older brother’s wedding. I was 18 at the time and blissfully unaware of the significance until people started talking about it while we were in the air and nearing Soviet airspace. Thankfully, our pilots had properly functioning equipment and we didn’t get shot down.
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It was September, 1976.
***KAL Flight 007 ***
I was working the midnight shift and had a radio handy. I got news every hour and I still remember each update from “reported missing” at 1:00AM up till 6:AM, each report getting worse.