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.
