Larry McDonald - KAL 007

KAL 007

McDonald was invited to South Korea to attend a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the United States–South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty with fellow members of Congress, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, and Representative Carroll Hubbard of Kentucky. Due to bad weather on Sunday, August 28, 1983 McDonald's flight from Atlanta was diverted to Baltimore and when he finally arrived at JFK Airport in New York he had missed his connection to South Korea by two to three minutes. McDonald could have boarded a Pan Am Boeing 747 flight to Seoul, but he preferred the lower fares of Korean Air Lines and chose to wait for the next KAL flight two days later. Simultaneously, Hubbard and Helms planned to meet with McDonald discussing the means on how to join McDonald on the KAL 007 flight. As the delays mounted, instead of joining McDonald, Hubbard at the last minute gave up on the trip, canceled his reservations, and accepted a Kentucky speaking engagement whilst Helms attempted to join McDonald but was also delayed.

McDonald occupied an aisle seat, 02B in the first class section, when KAL 007 took off on August 31 at 12:24 a.m. local time, on a 3400-mile trip to Anchorage, Alaska for a scheduled stopover seven hours later. The plane remained on the ground for an hour and a half during which it was refueled, reprovisioned, cleaned and serviced. The passengers were given the option of leaving the aircraft but McDonald remained on the plane, catching up on his sleep. Helms meanwhile had managed to arrive and invited McDonald to move onto his flight, KAL 015, but McDonald did not wish to be disturbed. With a fresh flight crew, KAL 007 took off at 4 a.m. local time for its scheduled non-stop flight over the Pacific to Seoul's Kimpo International Airport, a nearly 4500-mile stretch that would take approximately eight hours. On September 1, 1983, McDonald and the rest of the passengers and crew of KAL 007 were killed when Soviet fighters, under the command of Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, shot down KAL 007 near Moneron Island after the plane entered Soviet airspace.

The International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors, a group made up of some families of the victims of the shootdown, maintains that there is reason to believe that McDonald and others of Flight 007 survived the shootdown. The committee corroborates this theory with claims that Soviet military communication and Black Box transcripts show a post missile detonation flightpath at altitude 5,000 meters for almost 5 minutes until over the only land mass in the Tatar straits and within Soviet territorial waters, where it began a slow spiral descent. This would indicate both, the aircraft's capability of extended flight and pilots' intention to water land near the only point where rescue would be feasible; the committee claims a lack of bodies, body parts and tissues, and luggage, both on the surface of the sea and at the bottom; the Soviet obstruction of U.S., Korean, and Japanese search vessels trying to enter into Soviet territorial waters around Moneron Island, near which KAL 007 was last tracked spiraling downward; Russian Federation released previously unknown Soviet transcripts of mission orders within one half hour of the shootdown, sending helicopters, KGB patrol boats, and civilian trawlers to Moneron Island; and the Russian Federation acknowledgement of Soviet deception in its part of the search for KAL 007, all indicate a Soviet recovery of passengers and crew from the damaged and downed passenger jet. This viewpoint has received some coverage in the conservative news agency Accuracy in Media and also the New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. Since June 2012, there is a petition drive, supported by Senator Scott Brown, to be presented to President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, to reopen the investigation into the shooting down of KAL 007 and reports of the survival of Congressman McDonald .