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3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile
jones_supa (887896) writes It has come to light that a Finnair-owned McDonnell Douglas DC-10 passenger jet narrowly avoided being shot down by a missile while en route to Helsinki 27 years ago, claimed the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on Sunday. The two co-pilots, Esko Kaukiainen and Markku Soininen, describe how the event happened during a routine flight back to Helsinki from Japan in December 1987. When the plane was crossing the Arctic Ocean, a missile appeared in the distance. The crew thought it was a Russian weather rocket on its way into space, but the missile began heading straight towards the aircraft. Just 20 seconds away from a collision, the missile exploded. The captain, who was resting at the time of the incident, never officially reported the event. The question of who fired the missile has never been definitively answered. But the pilots believe it was launched from either the Soviet Union's Kola Peninsula or a submarine in the Barents Sea. They speculate that the missile could have been a misfire or that the plane was used as training target.
It's probably coincidence that they remember it at this time.
There are people who recommend Finlandization as a policy. They are terribly misguided. It's a form of moral debasement. It leads to secrecy and lies. It's not a valid policy. If it had continued for a few decades longer, we'd probably have joined the Soviet Union voluntarily. It was a form of slow national suicide.
Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
Even for a very slow (Mach 1) missile, that's several miles flight time. For a missile flying a reasonable speed, it's ten or more miles.
I think you mean Whaam!.
Probably a US sub-launched ICBM.
1. There is no such thing as a "sub-launched ICBM". Subs carry SLBMs and SLCMs.
2. Any kind of BM would follow a completely different trajectory than the one described.
3. The "B" in ICBM/SLBM means "ballistic". That means that after the initial burn, it is guided by inertia, and would have no ability to track a moving target.
Are you unaware that there are multiple versions of surface-to-air missles, and that some may have features that others do not?
This implies that the plane shot down by a russian missile in Ukraine was destroyed on purpose, since the missile could have exploded before hitting its target.
I don't think anyone was in much doubt that it was deliberately shot down. What they thought they were shooting down is another matter.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Here's something I don't know the answer to: Do air-to-airs or ground-to-airs have any sort of range safety feature like rockets, or do they just automatically blow up at the end of their runs? Or both? Or neither (in which case why did it blow up?)?
In that era, yes. I beleive most anti-aircraft missle systems in that era were semi-active radar guided missiles which require a ground based radar to paint the target. Most likely there was a safety system where if the painting radar shuts down the missle destructs. Even air to air radar missles (e.g. Aim-7 Sparrow) required the firing aircraft to keep it's nose pointed towards the target aircraft to keep it painted. I beleive the Aim-54 Phoenix was one of the first missles with self contained terminal guidance.
Who is John Galt?