Sixteen years ago, a leery Soviet military spotted Korean Air Lines Flight 007 invading its airspace on its way from Anchorage to Seoul.
With the Cold War at its zenith and paranoia running high, Soviet MiG fighter pilots scrambled against the invasion of their airspace, downing the KAL Boeing 747 jumbo jet with four heat-seeking missiles.
The Soviets insisted that the KAL jet had been on an unspecified spy mission. South Korea and the U.S. maintained that the aircraft had accidentally strayed off course.
On Wednesday, five hours after United Airlines Flight 895 and its 190 passengers depart from O’Hare International Airport, it will enter Russian airspace. It will pass only a few hundred miles west of Magadan, the site where 269 passengers and crew, including 61 Americans, aboard the KAL flight were killed.
This time, Russian air traffic controllers will assist the United jet across the nation’s airspace. There are no celebrations planned by United or the Russians for this event. Virtually no one on Russian soil will even notice. And yet, United Flight 895 represents the aviation equivalent of a chunk of the Berlin Wall coming down.
For United and other international air carriers, Wednesday’s “demonstration flight” over Russian airspace offers the promise of a great business opportunity: a shortened flight–over the North Pole–from the U.S. to the Far East that makes the Elk Grove Township-based carrier more competitive and the trip much more fuel efficient.
For Russia, the flight signifies another small, albeit significant, step in the thawing of relations with the U.S.
For more than 50 years, Russia and the old Soviet Union have fiercely restricted the air corridors that could be flown by commercial airliners. Flights through Siberia, where the United test flight will pass Wednesday, were flatly prohibited–they would come too close to sensitive Soviet military installations.
Magadan, home of the Russian 9th fleet and its nuclear submarine fleet, will take on new significance Wednesday when Russian air controllers housed in a joint U.S.-European air traffic control facility will guide the United flight through Russian airspace.
The stakes for international air carriers are extraordinarily high. The trans-Pacific market is expected to generate more than half the world’s air traffic in a little more than a decade. Direct routes over the North Pole and Siberia could cut millions of dollars in annual fuel costs and an hour or more from the flight times for United, Northwest Airlines and Cathay Pacific, which also this month flew “demonstration flights.”
If these “demonstration flights” go smoothly as expected, both for the airlines and the Russians, United and the other carriers hope to begin regularly flying this route before the end of this year.
“This will allow us to get above the winds,” said Mike Cuddy, one of four captains United has assigned to fly the special flight. “Instead of 200-knot winds right on the nose, we’ll have a slight tail wind.”
Flying over the old Soviet Union won’t come cheaply, however. Russians, strapped for hard cash, charge $1,800 for the few flights they currently allow to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
They are expected to charge as much as $5,000 for the flights over their airspace–if they begin later this year.
Experts on Russian affairs contend that the Polar flight in a north-south direction over once hypersensitive Siberia is a significant development in Russian-American relations.
“We’ve come a long way . . . it does represent a change,” said Marshall I. Goldman, professor of Russian economics at Wellesley College and associate director of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University.
“For an American plane to be flying in that direction is a breakthrough,” Goldman said. “It does reflect how much the world is a much safer place.”
Melor Sturua, senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, called the flight “a significant sign of the changing atmosphere, one more example of how the world has changed for the better.
“You are flying now to a Communist Hong Kong over a democratic Russia,” said Sturua, who has maintained his former Soviet position as political commentator for the Russian daily Izvestia.
The magnitude of political and psychological change within the Kremlin is evident considering the Kremlin’s emphasis on secrecy before the Soviet Union came to an end late in 1991.
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Another outburst of Kremlin fury over a violation of Soviet airspace occurred in 1987, when Mathias Rust, a young West German pilot, landed his light aircraft in Moscow’s Red Square after having flown undetected across Russia from Western Europe. The incident led to a purge of the nation’s top defense officials. Rust was released from prison in 1988.
Throughout the Cold War, concerned Soviet officials often compelled foreign diplomats, correspondents and other international travelers to occupy seats above the wings of Aeroflot aircraft to block sighting of the ground over Siberia and elsewhere. Passengers reported that airline personnel quickly pulled down window shades after some Soviet aircraft had made emergency landings at unscheduled airfields to shield their eyes from airport facilities.
Sturua recalled how the United States under the Eisenhower administration proposed an open-air policy that was immediately rejected by the Kremlin as a tool of espionage against the former Soviet Union.
“Now nobody thinks in terms of espionage,” Sturua said. “Governments think in terms of economic necessity or economic advantages. The point of view itself has changed drastically. The disappearance of the fear that somebody would spy from above is also a sign of the changes in Russia.”
United senior flight dispatcher Gene Cameron has been plotting the flight path since last summer, when Russians proposed opening their airspace to more flights. Only a half hour will be saved in the grueling 15-hour, 55-minute flight to Hong Kong. Another half hour could be saved if the Chinese would allow carriers to fly straight south from Mongolia to Hong Kong, rather than diverting east to Beijing.
For Cameron and United, the new flight path offers the possibility of non-stop service to some points, such as New Delhi, that United now can only reach via connecting flights.
United doesn’t anticipate any problems once the flight comes under Russian control.
Goldman said that while paranoia still exists in Russia and some areas remained closed to Americans, most of the formerly secret regions have opened up.
“If satellites can fly overhead and photograph everything that one can imagine, what is a commercial plane going to do,” he said.
“It is a very different world,” Goldman said. “We’ve come a long way.”