Originally posted by MobyDog:
If you're gonna subscribe to conspiracy theorists as source... Don't.
Other than the first article, the rest are a pack of nonsense that simply clumped together a few writing from other conspiracy theorists and tried to label it as "authoritative views."
Try scrolling down a bit on the 2nd and 3rd articles and see what the comments on them are like.
Some of their alleged knowledge on missile performance almost seems laughable, especially the notion that "heat seekers" will only hit engines.
In fact, I would agree to most of wikipedia's article Except for the 120 rounds of gun fire. Other than that, I find they are largely correct about this. They provided more factual information than "Views" and "opinions." The 2nd and 3rd article you gave simply had too much unverifiable "evidence" that seemed to originate from other "theories."
About the 120 rounds of gunfire... Firstly, Soviets claimed that KAL 007 ignored the tracers flying past their aircraft. It was supposed to be a "final" warning that an attack was imminent. There are 2 critical flaws to this.
1. The weapons were not loaded with tracers. Yes, its a huge allegation, to make. The Soviets were not exactly the first rate air force that that adhered strictly to policies and religiously loaded tracers to their aircraft. Of course, this was probably due to logistic problems as well.
2. The 747 was misidentified as the RC-135 Rivet Joint the whole time. The 747 is a much larger aircraft. In all aerial gunnery, a pilot practices to lead his fire to coincide with the target's flight path. For that, one needs to judge the target's distance correctly in order to have a valid solution. So the pilot open fired on what he thought was an RC-135, attempting to lead his rounds so that they were visible (what the hell, no like there were tracers anyway). The rounds would have "landed" awfully short (far far behind the 747) due to the fact that it was a much bigger target, and further away.
No, the Su-15 flagon did not have a radar and computer capable of calculating firing solutions for the pilot unlike our F-16s. They didn't even have HUDs depicted in the Air Crash Investigation video.
So, how did the pilot finally noticed that his target was a civilian 747? Because the passenger lights were on, at least some of them were. Theoretically, missiles outranged guns. But dumb fark pilot misjudged range because his target was much bigger and further away. When he flew closer for his heat seekers, (most probably R-60 Aphids, which are pretty worthless), he was able to finally notice the passenger window lights. Of course, by then, he was already given the order to shoot after all the catch up he had to make for the bad distance judgment.
The missiles followed the heat source, which were the engines, but proximity fuses would allow it to detonate its warhead when it came near an aircraft. Given that the entire intercept was carried out the 747's 6'O' clock position at low aspect, no kidding the tail section was shredded.
A plane can still fly without its tail section. It's just not controllable, and would very well crash soon. It took 12 minutes to crash because it's wings were still intact, and the aerodynamics of the aircraft doesn't force a 747 to go into a steep "dive of doom" upon loss of power. The Air Crash Investigation video is relatively accurate that the aircraft would have spiraled down, at a rather quick rate.
At the end of the day, it was 2 major fark ups that resulted in this. The flight crew for forgetting they were on a magnetic heading mode for the INS, and the Soviets for assuming that every American jet was a Rivet Joint.
Seriously, if I were the Soviets, and I thought I shot down a Rivet Joint, I'd send every naval asset to recover whatever bits of SIGINT technology remnants too. But of course, all they found were 747 remnants, black boxes, and perhaps bodies that had to be hidden in order to "hopefully" convince everybody else in Russia that it was an espionage flight.
Honestly, I don't blame anyone for believing these conspiracy theories. Theres too many of them, and they often cloud the truth.
