This was mentioned in Reagan but it is something that has always interested me.
Where did all the luggage and bodies go?
Just saw an episode of Air Disasters about that flight. It appeared it went down over water. The Russians recovered the black boxes but held onto them for 10 years before handing them over. The US military, at some point, admitted they had a spy plane operating in the same area as the KAL flight path. Speculation was the Russians could have gotten the two planes mixed up on radar since the KAL flight was somewhat off course. The question not answered was couldn’t the pilot that fired the missile see it was a passenger plane, that was not known.
They thought it was a spy plane marked as a civilian aircraft.
I’m curious where did all the luggage and bodies go.
Retired pilot here. That was before GPS came available. GPS made navigation for airlines, marine and everything else so easy.
Back in 1983 they may have been using Loran or inertial navigation. Inertial navigation for airlines typically used 3 very precision gyroscopes. With the plane at the gate the pilots would “initialize” the system inputting the Lat Long of that exact gate. As the aircraft moved the Gyro system would know almost exactly where it was. You could navigate hours away and you would be within 100 feet accuracy.
If the crew screwed up the initialization there might be a huge inaccuracy. I don’t know exactly why the Korean air crew was so far off course. With modern GPS systems this would be much less likely to happen.
Wintermute asks where the bodies and luggage went. Well, down into the water with the airplane. Without doing any research I don’t recall if anything was ever recovered.
They have a variance of 10 degrees in the ins.
No idea if that an easy mistake, a common mistake or what.
One theory is nobody want to tell the captain they were off course due to the culture.
Well that is the question. Russians claims there were no bodies and all the luggage was gone. Not even a handle.
No doubt they would not mention that a great Patriot died that day. That would be Larry McDonald (D-Ga). Possibly the last great Dim. He and Ron Paul were the two congress critters known to vote the correct way every time.
I’ve found it an interesting case
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