Sebastien Roblin
The April 1978 shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 902 by a Soviet Su-15 fighter plane—which killed two passengers but spared 107 others—distressed the Soviet air force, not because it had shot down a civilian airliner, but rather that it had gotten so far into Soviet airspace before being intercepted.
Five years later, a second encounter between Su-15s and a Korean airliner would result in far heavier loss of life.
On Aug. 30, 1983, KAL Flight 007 departed from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, bound for Seoul with 269 crew and passengers aboard. The 747 airliner made a refueling stop at Anchorage, Alaska, where the crew was informed that one of radio navigation beacons the flight computer usually relied on was non-functional.
The crew was supposed to switch the computer to follow the a gyroscope-based Inertial Navigation System, but for some reason it was not properly reset. Thus, when the plane missed the beacon, its autopilot remained fixed on a straight-line heading mode which led it hundreds of miles off course towards the Kamchatka peninsula, which served as a base for Russian nuclear forces.Cold War tensions were at peak that year, and an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane had snooped just outside the Kamchatka airspace earlier that day. When Soviet radars detected the approaching jumbo jet, the Soviet Air Defenses Forces (PVO) scrambled four MiG-23 interceptors to deal with the interloper.
However, heavy winds had disabled several of ground-based defense radars in the region, and without full coverage the Soviet fighter planes could not locate the airliner. The MiG-23s returned to base, short on fuel. This was in part due to a policy of limiting the fuel load on standby aircraft after defector Victor Belenko flew his MiG-25 all the way to Japan in 1975.
https://warisboring.com/a-soviet-fighter-planes-tragic-error-brought-us-google-maps/
