Atrocity In the Skies

(5 of 10)

After reaching cruising altitude (35,000 ft.), many passengers took off their shoes, loosened neckties, reached for pillows and stretched out to sleep. Some watched the in-flight movie, Man, Woman and Child, a tearjerker about a married man suddenly discovering that he had fathered a son during an earlier affair. When not serving middle-of-the-night snacks and cocktails, the attendants kept the cabin lights low. The trip to Anchorage was uneventful. Flight 007 touched down at 7:30 a.m. E.D.T. Wednesday (2:30 a.m. in Anchorage).

Most of the bleary-eyed passengers walked off the plane to stretch their legs and sip coffee in a holding area at the terminal. As they milled about, service crews vacuumed the 747's rugs, emptied ashtrays, placed clean linen on the backrests. Ground personnel pumped 37,750 gal. of Aiel into the plane's tanks, enough for its normal cruising range of about 6,000 miles. A fresh crew, led by Captain Chun Byung In, a veteran of 10,547 flying hours, took over in the cockpit. One fortunate family left Flight 007 in Anchorage. Robert Sears, a freight handler for Alaska International Air, had been vacationing in New York with his wife and two children.

Within minutes, an identical 747, KAL's flight 015 from Los Angeles, descended out of the darkness and taxied up to its sister jet. Also bound for Seoul, it would follow Flight 007 by about 20 minutes. Many of its passengers joined those from Flight 007 in waiting out the 90-min. rest stop. There was no hurry, since Kimpo would not open until 5 p.m. (6 a.m. in Korea).

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms stepped off Flight 015. He was part of an official six-man congressional delegation representing the U.S. at a conference in Seoul to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the U.S. Helms stopped to chat with a young Australian couple and their two daughters from Flight 007. "She was reading to those beautiful little girls," he recalled later, through tears. "It was the most marvelous thing you could have seen." With Helms was Idaho Senator Steve Symms. They looked for Georgia Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald, who was scheduled to be one of the main conference speakers. They knew he had taken the other flight. "Larry had no trouble sleeping on planes," Symms said later. "So he stayed on board during the stopover, and we never saw him." Added Helms: "Maybe if we had, we would have persuaded him to join us—or he might have got us to join him."

Kentucky Congressman Carroll Hubbard also got off Flight 015. He had expected to join McDonald on Flight 007, but had canceled his reservation at the last minute in order to accept a speaking engagement in Kentucky. McDonald had originally been booked on Sunday's Flight 007, but had missed it when his connecting plane from Atlanta was diverted because of thunderstorms in New York City. He had time to catch a Pan Am flight to Seoul but preferred the lower fare he had arranged with KAL.

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