Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 90: KAL Flight 007

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

revisionists revisionists revisionists. youre all revisionists   Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All right, let me let me start with what we were talking about off-camera. Yeah, that's snooze. Stop buying Zinn pouches. Start doing what I used to do and import it from Sweden. Well, the reason the reason I should say that we're talking about is because I keep getting promoter tweets and I blame this entirely on Liam for something called Nordic spirit, which is a tobacco-free snooze, which is literally, I just imagine this is a little packet of like hubs, if you prefer, that you just like put in your lip and just leave there. There is herbal dip. Just eat chew grass if that's what you want to do. It's smoky mountain. It's not very good. It's designed to help you stop smoking. It's like an 18th century French peasant

famine. It doesn't taste like that. It tastes not good. I've had it. Ross has seen me use it. It's not good. I'm imagining. I'm imagining a sort of like dip that's rebranded as a health food or a health substance. It's like infused with the essential oils and crap. Yeah. Or you could just buy grizzly wintergreen like an adult. She agrees, people. I did like the tweet you did, because this is just talking about each other's tweets now. Yeah. Where it's the cat and you have Copenhagen wintergreen long cut. No, not that one. Yes, up a level. Yes. Thank you. Because that was my life for a long time. When you've got a fucking like manipulate the cashier like one of those remote control arm games. Oh, it sucks. Yeah. Such an asshole. They feel stupid, but they don't do

the displays themselves. The distributor does. No, it got worse in Britain because like, and thankfully this happened to be after I quit smoking, but they did the plain packaging law. So now you have to like be able to go, okay, yeah, I'd like a pack of like Lucky Strikes or whatever. Pick them out of this identical lineup. Up a bit, left a bit, left a bit. It's like, yeah, great. I mean, it's a good public health intervention to make smoking as annoying as possible. But like, do they have chewing tobacco in the United Kingdom? Not commonly. It's not really, it's not really a thing here. Like the more sort of like generally speaking, you'd either do cigarettes or you'd have like a pouch of like loose tobacco that you'd either roll your own or

like smoke a pipe with if you're really old. But like, yeah, no, it's not really a thing here. You can't buy snooze. Oh, according to whoever this tobacco company is, the United Kingdom, you actually can't buy dip or snooze. You can only buy snuff and chewing tobacco. This is like a repressive country, man. Every day it reminds me more of George Orwell's novel 1984 in that you can't buy snooze or dip. Anyway, this has been the snooze hour. I was about to say, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. Most of us snooze, really. No, it's about snooze. Sometimes we talk about various forms of tobacco. Yeah, you shouldn't smoke kids. It's not. No, also, you shouldn't mail me tobacco.

Shouts to the one guy who did, but I got yelled at. Yeah, don't get Liam in trouble. So anyway, I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm a person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Gordwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking down my pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are buy and snooze. You're really going hard for the attempt to get by snooze to like sponsor us. Damn it. We're all wearing like NASCAR fire suits with a shitload of sponsors on them to record. We keep asking us to cut ads and we keep refusing because none of them are buy snooze.com. If you want us to advertise your product, have you considered getting a cooler product?

I'm not cutting your War Thunder ad. Leave me alone. God, I used to play fucking. My pronouns are he and him. I spent a year and a half playing War Thunder near on every day. I got just far enough that I got my first jet, got immediately owned and never logged in ever again. War Thunder is Earth's greatest scam. Never ever play War Thunder. So we're not cutting an ad for them. No. Speaking of jets getting owned. Oh, shit. That's a nice ass segue. I was about to say, well, the Soviet Union never killed James Bond, but they did get a 007. Yes, which is what we're going to be talking about today. Korean Airlines Flight 007.

I'm just sad that like clearly this got owned so hard that you can't even do that. It's not supposed to look like that. Instead, you have a picture of what it is supposed to look like. This is what it's supposed to look like. Yes. Now it does. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. We're so fucked, man. Oh, yeah. We got a new COVID variant came out. This one just drops. Just came just came from South African. South Africa. What a surprise. Carried entirely through shoe polish. And losing. And losing in the World Cup final. That's right.

Despite me putting $150 on you dumbass people. The Omicron variant. Because we're getting kind of into the weeds of the Greek alphabet here. Yeah. And they skipped new and Z because they didn't want to make it seem like it's new COVID because people would get paranoid. And they didn't want to call it G because that G Jing Ping. And then everyone would think, oh my God, it came from a lab in China. That's so fucking tenuous. Isn't it like the Greek letter is Chi, right? Yeah, I think Chi is Z. Alpha Z Delta was the sorority. Okay. I don't remember.

Listen, college was a long time ago. We're all old now. That's true. If a college fraternity pronounces it that way, it's probably right. You have to hold the match. They're very intellectual there. Recite the Greek alphabet before the match or is your fake? No, just me. Okay. Okay. That's a fucking lawrence of Arabia. Shit. Like that out. Like that out. Also the name of the fraternity. So this thing is all kinds of fun because it's like got a million mutations all on the spike protein, which is, you know, what the vaccines target. And anecdotally, a lot of people seem

to have mild cases, but the data that's out would seem to indicate, you know, the reverse would be the general condition, right? But I say everyone who has a smart blue check mark next to their name is saying, well, we have to wait for the science to come out to make any decisions. No, we don't. Which it's not going to come out for a few weeks at which point it will have already run rampant. It'll be too late to do anything. Oh yeah. This was going before we even knew where it was or where it was from. First detected in South Africa. And sequence there. It's not South Africa. Which brought back a shitload of travel bands, which is fun. That's going to be gone.

Basically, the only thing here is that we would tell you is don't smoke and also if you do smoke, cannot emphasize that enough. If you can get a booster shot, then booster shots have gotten to this point. Because we call them boosters, right? And because there's been this failure of communication, people think that they're like a nice thing to have instead of like an essential. And they are an essential and you should get like a third dose as soon as you're offered one. Yeah, I'm going to try and do it tomorrow, actually. Which hopefully won't delay this podcast because I had a nasty reaction to the second dose. Oh, you sure did, baby. As far as anecdotes go, everybody I know who's had a booster already

is like it doesn't really do anything like in terms of reactions. So who's to say? I got knocked on my ass for about six hours. Yeah. I guess I'm just built different. I was out for like a day and a half. Fuck you, Alice. I'm getting, I'm scheduled to get the booster and a flu shot the same day and I'm going to try and get them in the same arm. Nice. That'll be fun. Yeah, I just don't need to use this one. I'm going to give myself the stranger a bunch of times when I get home. It's fine. Stool hardners, stool softners, my body won't know what to do. That'll be the mortician's problem. If you get the vaccine and the flu shot at the same time in different arms,

your body takes a screenshot. Yeah, I saw you. I saw you do that tweet already. Thank you. This is a tweet review. It's for the review. All right. In other news, the Supreme Court's going to overturn Roe versus Wade. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. They're gonna do it. I have nothing funny to say other than fuck the Democrats. Yeah. Fuck the Republicans. Yeah. I don't want to hear anything in the comments. It's just like, yeah, well, if you voted for, I did. All right. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I fucking threw up in my trash can and voted for Hillary, Ron and Clinton in 2016. Absolutely. You didn't

hold up your fucking end of the bargain. Yeah, absolutely. Stop fucking using Roe as a cudgel for, like, fundraising. Because that's what it is to these fucking people. Pelosi said you could be a pro-life Democrat. No, you fucking can. Hillary had a pro-life VP candidate with Tim Kaine. Like, am I the only person who remembers that shit? Am I going completely fucking insane? And of course, now, like, with a fucking, like, a 6-2 or whatever, 6-3. 6-3. With a 6-3 majority, like, it's gonna be Roe, then it's gonna be fucking Lawrence, Texas too, probably. Just sort of this long game that's been going for a generation. And the really funny thing that's gonna happen is that Stephen Breyer is gonna fucking not retire and then die

the day after Trump gets reelected. Yep. That's happening. It's gonna happen while we're recording a podcast and Justin's gonna become deranged again. I don't know. I guess we'll put up something in the description about the very limited stuff you can do because who gives a shit this has already been bought and paid for. You're gonna overturn Roe. Abortion, I don't think I have to say this, our listeners. Abortion is medicine. Abortion is fine. Cry about something else. If you're listening to this podcast, you're not familiar with our politics. Absolutely suck my nads and die. But yeah, you should be pissed off. You should be pissed off at Democrats who think you're stupid. You should be pissed off at Republicans who are fascists. Stop fucking telling

me to elect Democrats when y'all won't do shit. And stop fucking emailing me asking for money. Yes. And there's an easy solution here which Non wants to consider, which is Joe Biden doesn't the court. Pack the court. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's you're not being aggressive enough. Joe Biden does an executive order saying Marbury versus Madison was wrongly decided. Yeah. Judicial review is not real. It's unconstitutional. Get the fuck out of here. Get out of here. I don't give a shit about the Supreme Court. You know, go go. Here's some dumb appeals or something. Right? You know, get rid of this fucking, this fucking. No one else has it. The power you gave yourself. Yeah, from whole cloth. Mm hmm. Yep. That's good. Yeah. Anyway, this is an anti Supreme Court

podcast. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Zero zero, but as opposed to five four. Yes. This is no more Supreme Court justice as America has evolved beyond the need for Supreme Court justices. Also the Senate. Also that's yeah. What we're saying is constitutional convention immediately. It's right in New York. The old one kind of sucks too. Yeah, you're supposed to write a new constitution every like 40 years or so. So if you're a healthy state anyway, that was the goddamn news. All right, I'll say something happy like an airline that got shot down. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. So I did get rid of a U.S. Congressperson. This is true. Though not a Senator, it was a representative. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I could have gotten a Senator. We'll talk about that

later. So I think we should have some context before we start here. And we have to ask the question, how do airliners navigate, right? Because you know, most of the sky looks pretty similar, especially at night. Land is way down below you, right? So you can't like, there's not a lot of landmarks there to look at. How do you do it? Just in general, you don't want to be in the cockpit of an airliner and turn around and see your co-pilot operating a sextant. Yes. I believe. They literally did do that. Yeah. In some like World War II bombers that kept in service as passenger airlines into the 50s, they had star viewing domes to do that. I believe airliners are still equipped with sextances like a backup measure.

Just in case. I mean, the Navy was reintroducing celestial navigation a few years ago in case computer systems got hacked. Yeah. You got to know how to do it. That's fine. I'm fine with that. Okay. So this is the pre-GPS era, right? We don't have global positioning system, right? And these planes have to navigate over like, especially large bodies of water, like the Pacific Ocean say, and you have to have a relative idea of where you are, where you're going, so on and so forth, right? And a big way to do it so that you, the pilot, don't have to worry about it is through autopilot, right? And this is also sort of a conversation about how does the autopilot know where it is, right?

Well, the thing inflates and then there's like a big guy in the seat and he steers the plane. Exactly. But how does Otto know where he's going? And Otto has several settings he can choose from, right? So if you have like, one option on your autopilot is you set the plane on a constant heading, right? So the autopilot maintains the current direction and altitude, right? That's how it's explained to be an archer. So that's how it super works. Yes. But then you have other options, like you have VOR slash LOC, right? And this is something that puts the plane on a predetermined course based on the location of big ground-based very high frequency omnidirectional radar beacons like this guy here, right?

No. That's usually useful over land or in high traffic areas. I think I'm not an airplane expert. I cannot stress this enough. Yeah, stop yelling at us. I always worry when we do these airplane episodes because I genuinely have no idea what I'm talking about a lot of the time. You know, so you have ILS that's your instrument landing system that responds to a whole lot of ground-based equipment to guide you into a runway sort of without having to do a visual approach, right? But then there's a fun one called INS. That's the inertial navigation system, right? If you're going over the ocean, there's no ground-based radar, right? And you don't have GPS. So what you wind up with is a sort of course which is determined exclusively by internal

sensors and instruments, accelerometers, stuff like that on the plane and sort of dead reckoning, right? And then there's specified waypoints along the way where the system resets itself, so the error doesn't get too great because if you're navigating exclusively based on previous positions, that error factor just increases exponentially, right? Yeah, it magnifies itself, yeah. Yes. So but this inertial navigation system is required where there's no ground-based radar, right? But it requires the plane to be in the right place and going the right speed in order for it to work properly, right? Since these errors are, you know, they keep compounding, right? Right. And we don't use it as much now because, you know, we have GPS to assist, but, you know,

this was a big way to do it back in, you know, 70s, 80s, what we're talking about right now, right? Now, with that in mind, talk about the flight here. This is KL007. It's September 1st, 1983, right? And this is a scheduled flight from JFK Airport in New York City to Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, South Korea. My favorite. No, I'm not going to make the Gimsuit job. Gimpo is a funny name. It is, but also. We have to be respectful because we're never respect all the people yelling at us. The aircraft is a Boeing 747-230B, right? And I don't know what 230B means in this case. It's a 747-200. That's a DLC installed. I was about to say, yeah. You know, I think it's bigger than a 747-100, but smaller than a 300.

That's what the 200 is, but the 230 means something. And the B means something. I don't know. I have no idea. I can tell you exactly what it means. So the 747-200 was the second model, like I'm marked to. The B is just that it's a passenger thing. So I don't know what the 30 is, but yes. I see. Well, one of the things here is today, a big flight like this can be done nonstop on like a 777 or some other equally long range, very fuel efficient plane. But in the mid-1980s, you couldn't really do that with the 747, right? So this flight stopped in Anchorage, Alaska for refueling and then proceeded from there to Gimpo International Airport, right? Now, this flight had 246 passengers and 23 crew aboard.

The plane was about half full with six crew were deadheading, right? And another person who was aboard was a congressman and prominent anti-communist, representative Larry McDonald, Democrat from Georgia. Love a Dixie Crat, absolutely. Proper Dixie Crat, yeah. He was a president of the John Birch Society as well. Oh, what an ass. Jesus Christ. He was like, he was like really known for his anti-communism. He loved McCarthy. Big fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Jesus. They were flying to a, he was flying to, I believe, a summit for the 30th anniversary of South Korean peace agreement of some kind with the United States. I don't, I don't remember, I didn't write that down.

Several other representatives and congress and senators are supposed to be there with them, but they bowed out at the last second and wound up on the flight following them. I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but when did South Korea stop being a military dictatorship? Because I feel like it wasn't like, if it wasn't at this point, then it had to have been in pretty recent memory. Yes, I believe so. When did South Korea become a democracy? 1987? 1987. All right. So, you know, the normal thing, you know, you go out and you fly and meet some dictators and stuff like that, you know, you know, that's, that's, that's an all American thing right there. Oh, sure. You know, the other folks are on the following flight, the other

big, big conservative names. I forget who it was exactly. But it was Salini. Exactly. Pinochet. All people that Joe Biden was friends with when he was in Congress. Yes. What's his name? That was from South Carolina for a trillion years. Strom Thurmond. Strom Thurmond. Strom Thurmond. So this plane departed from Anchorage slightly late at 4 a.m., right, from Anchorage, right?

And this plane was supposed to make use of a designated air corridor, right? In this case, something called Romeo 20, which was not the shortest trans-specific route from Alaska, but the shortest permissible one, right? You had to deviate slightly from, you know, the Great Circle, which is the shortest route from any point on Earth to another point on Earth, right? Why did I have to do that? The deviation was very important. It's the Cold War, Alice. It's because of the Soviet Union.

Yeah. You know about the Soviet Union? Yes. But we're fans with, you know, some criticism. I'm still embarrassed about the Adam Something episode, all right? I got to make up for it somehow. I'm triangulating. We're not that anti-Soviet, okay? Because as we do our episode about how the Soviet Union fucks up.

So anyway, we're in sort of the late Soviet Union, right? Yeah, the gerontocracy. Imagine a society where everybody in a position of power is in their 70s at their youngest. I mean, just imagine the kind of like unhealthy political system that would produce something where all of the decisions are made by a bunch of people who are so senile. Imagine such a world. Can you imagine that? Yeah. And we're actually post-Brezhnev at this point.

General Secretary Yuri Andropov is in charge, right? And he's sort of Brezhnev II, Brezhnev Harder, right? And he's also in generally poor health, right? I think he was only General Secretary for two years. Then some other guy came after him, right? I don't... Kosygin, I want to say. Yeah. And then after that, Gorbachev, of course,

destroyed the USSR with revisionism. And Pete's... Yes. At this point, there were a lot of Soviet jokes about how old their leaders are. My favorite of which is a very pure one, which is using the form of words that was used for death announcements. And the joke is, dear comrades, of course you're going to laugh, but another great tragedy has befallen the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Communist Party.

Yeah. So they go through a couple of General Secretaries really quickly, just because they keep the people who get in charge, keep getting sick and dying. And they keep unplugging them. Very old. Dialysis machine, like a made vacuuming, like, trips over the cord to the dialysis machine. And a great tragedy has befallen the Soviet Union and the all-Union Communist Party. Yeah. You also have the Soviet Union, the Communist Party,

is very paranoid at this point about Ronald Reagan, right? Yeah. This is the time of Abel Archer, the time when Ronald Reagan almost ignited World War III by accident. Yeah. Just because he kind of wanted to, you know? That man never saw a war he didn't like. Yeah. And he was doing all kinds of provocative crap. He starts the Star Wars program. That was sort of the strategic defense initiative, I believe it was formally called.

It was, in idea, they would put up some military satellites in space that could intercept Russian nuclear missiles before they reached their target. Iron dome, but it wouldn't have worked. Yeah. Well, the iron dome works so good, but... If the satellite's up there, it's probably not the most difficult thing to intercept the nuclear missile at the slowest part of its trajectory. Because it's true. Yeah. I don't know why I know that. You don't want to be gambling with shit like that.

And it's very dangerous to your sort of deterrence theory to be like, oh, yeah, we can just win a nuclear war. Yeah, exactly. If you're like, well, we could just do a nuclear war, no problem. Yeah. That's a kind of strategic thinking that hadn't been prevalent in the US since the 50s. This is one of those situations where, yeah, the propaganda is always like, the Soviet Union was willing to sacrifice its population in a nuclear war. And the US was the cautious one.

Well, he couldn't do that. That's kind of the reverse. Yeah. Plus, the Soviet thinking at this point, as far as we can tell from stuff that has made it out, is that any, sorry, in all Soviet planning, any nuclear exchange would have been started by the US. And it would be done typically in their thinking as an absolute surprise to them. And so that was sort of part of the paranoia, is that Reagan just decides, okay, now is go time.

And you're then in a situation where you have two or three minutes to obliterate the United States for fun. And then the USSR ceases to exist. Yeah, exactly. And Reagan's doing other stuff, right? He's deploying nuclear missiles in Europe, right? Turkey. Yeah. And they just did a big naval exercise called Fleet X-83, right? Yeah, they know how to name them.

Yeah, exactly. And that essentially involved the Navy bringing a whole bunch of boats to the edge of the Soviet territory in the Pacific, right? And they sort of poked at them, right? You know, they would send aircraft to do flyovers. They'd sort of skirt the edge of territorial waters, right? They used several flyovers. None of those aircraft were intercepted. And it was a big embarrassment for the Soviet air force, right?

Not even the air force. It was the air defense force. It was like a separate command structure, which then has to negotiate with the air force to deploy fighters. So there's internal Soviet politics going on here too. But the way in which these sort of air defense tests were done was you send a bunch of jets directly at, you know, whatever sort of heading for Moscow is, and then in like an attack formation, and then at the last possible second they pull off just to try and like freak out the Soviets, which is kind of wild.

Yeah. Also, I should point out one of the other things about this is that, like, there's a lot of sort of airborne surveillance activity, you know, electronic warfare, collecting, you know, missions for, you know, various kinds of like testing and, you know, sort of nuclear things. And that's all done by platforms that sort of like a large, essentially like very similar to commercial aircraft, like sort of adapted versions of airliners. Yeah. Most notably the Boeing RC-135, which we'll get to in a second. Sort of rivet joint, I want to say. Stupid ass codenames. Yeah. So, you know, your air defense people are very paranoid. In general,

Soviet government's very paranoid, right? And they were convinced Reagan is the guy, he's the guy who's going to do the preemptive nuclear strike. This could happen at any time. What about his astrologers? Yeah. Yeah, he's going to launch a decapitation strike on Moscow, which leads to another fantastic piece of Soviet technology, because they design a failsafe or deadhand or pedimetra, if you prefer, which is if the entire Soviet command is obliterated by the decapitation strike, the missiles just fire themselves.

Yeah. Nothing to worry about. But a big result of all this is that Soviet airspace was very heavily policed, not somewhere you want to stray into accidentally, right? So, flight paths avoided the most direct routes across the Pacific, so they could avoid Soviet airspace, right? Another effect of this is, I believe, Soviet Union had no access to air traffic control. I don't know exactly how that worked. That would have come up. Well, that's why they built their, I don't know if you have this in the notes. I'm looking at

something else. But one of the outcomes of this, I believe, is that GPS eventually becomes public and the Soviets build their own. Yeah, GLONASS. Yeah, GLONASS, yeah. Here's the route. This is Romeo 20 that this flight was supposed to take. You see, it goes south and swings back up the soul, right? And what it wound up on was much more direct route, right? 00:30:52,800 --> 00:31:00,400 But the problem was they never engaged their inertial navigation system, or at least this is

what the official report says, right? So once they got out of Anchorage, they passed Bethel, Alaska, which is the last radar station, right? And then they kept going straight. And this is good. It'll save a little bit of time getting the soul. But it's bad because you go straight over the Kamchatka Peninsula, right? And Kamchatka being, of course, very, very remote is where there were a couple of big secret military installations. Not to mention all the whaling boats. Yeah. Also, if you look at that, that, that flight path, it looks very much like the kind of thing that if

you were an American, you would do as a kind of a fuck you to Soviet air defenses to be like, yeah, I can just fly over this thing, skirt the edge of your airspace and come back out again before you can do anything. Exactly, right? And, and so, you know, of the theories there, you know, either they forgot to set the INS or the other theory is the INS didn't kick in because they were too far off course already for INS to kick in, right? Because it doesn't start unless you're within seven and a half miles of your intended course. I don't know how that works. But apparently, it was a very user unfriendly piece of equipment, right? You just get the fucking clippy pop up. It looks like you're trying to navigate to South Korea.

Well, no, that would have been more noticeable as a thing. But anyway, so these pilots, they're flying and they're drifting more and more off course, right? And they seem largely unaware of this. It's nighttime, by the way. So that's this definitely can see shit, right? Yeah. You're flying over the Bering Sea at night. This fuck was a look out of like, you know, monotonous. They're really bored, you know, they're jacking it. They start jacking it. I spy with my little eye something black. Oh, no, we've been intercepted. So there were there were some signs the plane was off course, right? Because they they had to relay their position every once in a while, the plane

behind them so they could relay it to air traffic control, right? And so that plane behind them was KAL 15, which we mentioned earlier, right? And it was strange since they never seem to be quite in range for their very high frequency radio. So they had to use normal high frequency radio, and no one could understand them because high frequency radio has lots of interference, right? You know, so that's kind of weird. But you know, it's probably nothing whatever, you know, especially when we get the plane on the ground. Yeah, sure. It's like an expected sort of error, like, you know, some which happens at the right is fine, whatever. Yeah, it's probably fine. If there's a real emergency, we can figure it out. So, you know, what else are you going to do?

What you would do is maybe check your position because there's there's other instruments on the plane that can figure out roughly where you are. But yeah, the sextant. Yeah, exactly. Break out the sextant cap. So 351 a.m. Smash it in with like a giant sextant shaped hammer. In case of emergency, break glass. And behind there, there's a sextant, a telescope and a fucking biker on hat. So at 351 Petropevlovsk-Kemchowsky time, they hit the Kamchatka peninsula, right? And things start to go to shit. All right. So this particular day, there was a missile test occurring at one of the air bases on the Kamchatka peninsula, right?

Okay, that's just horrible luck. Yeah, very bad luck. And Soviet air defense command knew there was an American RC 135 snooping around the outside of their airspace, right? And the RC 135 was saying, well, not touching you, not touching you. Yeah, exactly. Not touching you. It was coincidentally a large Boeing aircraft, you know, airliner shaped with four engines. And now with that in mind, a 747 is also a large Boeing aircraft, which is airliner shaped with four engines. In the dark. In the dark, right? And there was another circumstance, which is that Soviet air defense command detected the plane late, while it was already over the Kamchatka peninsula. This is because someone forgot to fix the radar,

which has been blown out in a gale 10 days before. They didn't send somebody across at like a toaster, a totally like blasted frozen more to go and fix the fucking radar. Yeah, exactly. That's just sloppiness. Well, apparently, someone had told Moscow they had fixed it in an attempt. Yeah, fucking damn it. I hate the 1980s. Yeah, they didn't want to get chewed out by someone. And I'll fix it eventually. Probably nothing will happen, right? So they they they detected this plane about two hours after they should have, right? And as a result, you know, the plane's almost out of the airspace already. They scrambled some fighters. They were MiG-23s, right? They try and make visual contact with the aircraft.

But apparently, somehow they managed to run low on fuel and had to turn back. Listen, at this point in the Soviet history, they're probably taking off with like fumes in the tank anyway. This is true. Yeah, there's a guy in the airbase who's like selling it off to people. It's yeah. So this was their first attempt at intercepting the unknown airline, unknown airplane, right? It was not back out over international waters. And this was really embarrassing, right? Because after the flyovers during Fleet X 83, a whole bunch of high ranking Soviet air defense guys had been fired for their failure to intercept any of the planes, right? But they they realized that this plane's on a constant heading. They have another chance

when it flies over Sakhalin, right? There's a Sakhalin. I don't know. Sakhalin, yeah. Sakhalin, okay. It was a very small window of opportunity though, right? Because Sakhalin is a very thin island. That's the big island just north of Japan, right? Used to be Japanese, but I think the Soviet Union took it over after World War II because fuck you. Yeah. This whole time, by the way, more and more senior people are getting out of bed at four in the morning. Yes. A lot of these orders come from like really high up, right? It's kind of like backseat driving. It's like it's micromanagement because you get like kernels and generals like yelling down the phone to captains and lieutenants who are like...

Shouting all over each other, one imagines. Yeah, exactly. Or at some points like actually yelling at the pilots. Yes. In order to destroy this mystery aircraft came from pretty high up. It was General Valery Kamensky, right? He's commander of Soviet air defense in the Far East, but he did want some visual confirmation to ensure it was not a civilian plane, right? It would look pretty bad if they shot down a civilian plane, but they had almost no time to do this, right? So they scrambled three SU-15 fighters from Dolensk Sokol Air Base, right? Which is on Sakhalin. And they got another MiG-23 to come in as well.

They made visual contact with the plane and one of the... So they're there. They're next to the plane, right? They're trying to intercept one of them fires warning shots at KAL 007, right? Now the problem was it was night and they were regular bullets. They weren't, they weren't tracer rounds. No tracer rounds now, so. Yes, that did. Now the other thing is they tried to, you know, dip their wings to indicate, hey, you're being intercepted and yet you go land somewhere, right? And no response. No one on the flight deck knows anything is happening, right? They don't know they're being intercepted. This is not a great interception in my mind. You generally know you're being intercepted if you want to not get shot down. And if you're not sure if the

plane is civilian or not, you should not get there. Get up there with the idea that we're going to not, we're absolutely, we want to shoot down this plane before we have other options. I don't know. I'm not a, I'm not a Soviet air defense guy. Maybe they have a different doctrine. So. Major. Genadiy Nikolayevich Azapovich, right? Yes. Gennady Nikolayevich Osipovich. Yes. He's in the lead SU-15. That's this, this fighter J here at the Cool Stainless Steel. Yeah, the flaggin. It's codenamed. Yeah. They imposed a lot of stupid NATO code names, reporting names on,

on Soviet aircraft. And a lot of Soviet pilots really hated them. The one they hated the most was the fishbed. That's just dumb. Because it had to start with an F to show that it was a fighter and had to be two syllables to show that it was jet-powered. But yeah, it was a MiG 21. They called it a fishbed. So Azapovich, he was in the lead plane, right? And according to a 1991 interview with his vestia, right, he was like, okay, this is a Boeing airplane, right? And, you know, but he's looking for a Boeing airplane. Yeah. With four engines. Yeah, four engines. He's like, okay, yeah, this is a, it kind of looked like it might be a civilian aircraft, because that's the windows on the side. But he thought, you know, maybe there's a modified

civilian plane being used. To trick us, dammit. Yeah, he is for military purposes, right? We fired some warning shots. It didn't even like blank. Exactly. Well, here's an interesting one. Now, keep in mind, they never actually tried to like contact the plane via radio, which would have been perfectly doable because, you know, everyone knows the emergency frequency, right? You know, all these generals are like arguing with each other that the plane's about to leave Soviet airspace again. Finally, someone says, listen, just shoot it down, right? Just fucking do it. We'll deal with it in the morning. And so Azapovich tries to get a lock on, right? The thing is, simultaneously, the crew of KL007 asked Tokyo Air Traffic Control for permission

to ascend to 35,000 feet for fuel economy, right? And this, this permission was granted. So just accidentally taking evasive maneuvers. Yes. Whoops. Quite literally. And this is where Azapovich was sure, all right, they're taking evasive maneuvers. This is, this is a military target, right? So the plane pitched up and slowed down, and Azapovich's Su-15 just blew right past it, right? Again, that would genuinely be quite clever if they had done it on purpose. They had done it on purpose. Yeah. We love to have an international incident where the explanation is whoopsie-daisy. So Azapovich does some like top gun shit to like get his plane in position to actually get a lock off. So slamming a beach volleyball around,

things are very confusing. He's probably having a fantastic time. He's like, oh, shit. I get to do it. I get to do it. I get to do it. I get to do the thing. Well, according to his interview in 1991, he's still sure it was a military target. Good for him. So he managed to get a lock on. He fires two K-8 missiles at it, right? Air-to-air missiles. And they both hit the tail of the plane, right? And this is where, all right, so this plane is not doing so hot. No, this is already a problem. Yeah. Yeah. It starts ascending involuntarily. They lose cabin pressure, right?

You know how, and I don't know if you're like afraid of flying, they tell you. Don't worry. Like, airliners, they're built redundant. They're built to keep flying in a lot of different situations. One of those situations where that is not the case is when they're hit with a missile designed to destroy an aircraft. Replace all civilian airliners with A-10s. They still have. That strong wing route, yeah. At this point, they still have limited control of the plane. Fairly impressive, actually. There were four hydraulic systems. Three of them were severed, were non-functional. They still had, I think, ailerons. And that was about it.

So, you know, the pilots are like, okay, we got to, we lost cabin pressure. We got to get this thing down to 10,000 feet immediately, which they start doing. They have enough control to do that. They start blaring the automatic emergency announcement in the cabin, which goes, put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent. I'm thinking I'm not going to put out my cigarette. I'm going to just eat it. I'm going to just eat it. If I'm going down, I'm taking all the tobacco in me. So, they have this plane relatively under control for like five or six more minutes. But by the time they get down to 16,000 feet, they lose it, right? And it starts spiraling around and losing altitude.

And after 12 minutes after the missile hit them, it hit the ocean, right? Right near Monoran Island, right? Which is just a couple miles from international waters. But they did do their credit. They kept it within Soviet airspace. So, all right. So, the plane crashed, everyone died. What did we learn? End of episode. End of episode. No, it gets it gets stupider. Hi, it's Justin. So, this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So, let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. No, some more Russians have to yell at each other about this.

It's the Soviet to the 80s. Things are going to get dumb as hell. Some generals have to yell at some other generals. Some guy named Vasily is just going to have to go diving. Yeah. So, well, there were some people yelling at Asipovich about why didn't you destroy the target because it was still flying for so long afterwards. What are you, gay or something? And about a half hour after the incident, they're like, oh, shit, that was an airliner. Fuck, whoops. Yeah, whoops. Asipovich sort of riding this high of like, I'm going to get promoted.

Coming in for a smooth landing, just like expecting a medal. He like does the top gun carrier scene at the end on his way out of the plane. And he just gets into the mess. Yeah, he gets into the mess. Everyone's staring at him. Well, I mean, you know, he followed the orders that were being rapidly sort of the landmarked very, very, very rapidly. Well, he thought it was a military target. And kind of all to this day, he thinks it was, which is super convenient for him. I kind of respect that over tired generals are just screaming at them.

They just woke up. It's from Russia. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's 3 a.m. Yeah, people get up early. It's 3 a.m. They've just gone to bed. No, okay. It was about 4 a.m. But well, there's also time zones is the other thing. All right. Just following orders is a bad argument. I'm sorry. Let's say Albert Spear can share a cell at Spandau. Let's say provocation and mistaken identity then. Yes. At some point, the U.S. Air Force has to own some share of responsibility for this.

Yes. About a half hour later, they start organizing search and rescue teams, right? And they dispatch helicopters to roughly the location of the shoot down. The Soviets do, right? They make some civilian fishing boats go to the scene, right? Yeah, because they have to, because this is so in the middle of nowhere. There's no, like, border guards who can get there on time. So it's literally, it's helicopters and it's fishermen. Yeah. And they get there and they're like, oh, shit, there's nothing here. Yeah. That was not a safe landing. You know, and it's not too long afterward that word gets out. This plane has been shut down.

There was some, there was some report for a while out there that the plane had been forced to land at Sakhalin. And, you know, in fact, it was forced to land in the water near Sakhalin and not safely. The event of a water landing. I have to 800 miles an hour. Yeah. Exactly. The event of a water landing. You could just say plane crash. So the, yeah, no captain Sully here, unfortunately, right? You know, and because it was the Cold War, you know, after research and rescue teams from the USA and Japan also arrived, no one could coordinate with each other. And in fact, they were actively harassing each other. Throwing rocks at each other.

Yes. You guys look like nerds. Just tossing stones in the other one. Japanese whaling mode is just ramming the Soviets. It's got the, like, cannons they use on Greenpeace boats, guy. The Soviets did attempt to board a Japanese search and rescue vessel, I believe, but the United States just shoved the destroyer in between the two boats and prevented them from doing that. Really? Love that kind of like muscular sort of naval diplomacy there. Yeah. They were all, they were all like, the Soviets were like trying to get lock-ons on the American ships. They were, they were doing everything short of shooting at each other. They may have even done a little bit of that. What's the most friendly shooting between superpowers?

Exactly. So, so the issue was this plane crashed in, you can see here on a diagram, this is Soviet territorial waters here, right? And so the Americans could only search outside of that circle, right? So, you know, and this is another circle, which is Japanese waters, excuse me, Soviet waters. So they're searching in sort of the area just outside that, right? And they're just trying to get as close as they can to territorial waters without giving the Soviets an excuse to do anything, although they're just doing it anyway. They're all, they're all having a great time just, just hitting each other, you know, just doing, doing, doing cold warship. Killing each other sticks, yes. Yeah, exactly. But the Soviets absolutely

refused to allow anyone into their territorial waters to look for the wreck, you know, which is the most likely location of it. I think everyone knew at this point. This is, this is, this all occurs over like the next week and a half, two weeks, right? Yeah, the Soviets are in full like ass covering mode at this point. Exactly. They're, they're, they have this sort of vested interest in finding the plane first so that they can grab the black box and find some excuse that it was a spy plane, right? Horridly paying to bunch of like USAF decals on it. The flight number said 007. Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. Yeah. So the Soviets found the plane, right? And according to some civilian divers who got down to the wreck later, they made a huge mess of it,

right? Well, they were in a hurry. On purpose or accidentally is my question. Yes. Yes. Guy in a full scuba gear going down there with a sledgehammer. Mm hmm. Well, a big, big part of it was they used. Don't make too big mess. You know what the silly do make too big mess. They used fishing trawlers. They used fishing trawlers to search for it, right? I guess they're just bringing up huge nets, full airplane parts. I should become a fisher of men. Yes. And the official story is very few bodies or body parts are recovered from the wreck and very little luggage, right? But the Soviets did manage to pluck the black box out of the wreckage. That's convenient. Yeah. There's also some speculation that the Soviets had

two search parties, one of which was a decoy to fool the Americans and Japanese into searching somewhere else for the wreckage. It was because it was so stupid. Yeah. This was all kept quiet until the fall of the Soviet Union, right? And the Soviet media initially was like, okay, Andropov said to keep quiet about this. So they did. They just said the military shot down a plane which violated Soviet airspace, but not that they had shot down an airliner, right? Yeah. Which no one believed, including the Soviet Union's own foreign ministry. They're like, no, we fucked up. You have to admit to this, right? But Andropov is very, very ill, barely competent to do anything. So I don't know if he was up to making big decisions like that.

Even if he was, he was like a lifelong KGB guy. He had that like instinctual secrecy, right? This is also true. An interesting one is on the US side, the National Transportation Safety Board was legally required to investigate the shootdown because the plane had US citizens on it and had departed from US soil, right? Ronald Reagan State Department says, And don't don't do that, right? And, you know, they block them on the grounds that the shootdown was not an accident, right? And I handed the investigation over to the International Civil Aviation Organization, right? Which didn't really investigate accidents. And unlike the NTSB, did not have the power of subpoena, right?

Oh, that Reagan, one smart guy. Yeah, I know, they couldn't compel anyone to provide any documents. So in order for this investigation to proceed, they required as full, full cooperation of all governments involved and the United States government itself, right? Oh, I bet they got it. Oh, yes, that means I got it. Yeah, there was some information that was never provided that should have been. Yeah, notably radar data from King Salmon, Alaska, which was the last location to track the plane on the US side. That was apparently quote unquote destroyed very shortly after the accident occurred. And I was never here. Yeah, exactly. I mean, why destroy it just because you don't want the Soviets to know

to what extent your radar is like covering Alaska or they said they usually just reuse the tapes. Yeah, it's like a last episode of Doctor Who. Lost episode before there's your problem for that. We will never release the last episode. ICAO, of course, they came to the conclusion this deviation was caused by a lack of awareness on the part of the flight crew. It's human error, right? Now, this is also done without the benefit of the flight data recorder, the black box, because the Soviets have it, right? And they're not sharing it. But in the meantime, the United States is reacting swiftly and punitively like Reagan's out there. He says this is a massacre,

an act of barbarism, right? Some of the intercepted radio communications about the plane were submitted at a UN special hearing, right? So everyone's kind of like, I had a Soviet shot this thing down. And Soviet media was even forced to admit, yeah, that was us. Oops. Um, they banned Aeroflot from flying into US airports. And, you know, the Soviets blamed the Americans for deliberately probing Soviet air defense systems and also sort of implied that, you know, this was a plane on a secret CIA mission. Yes, but not this time. Yeah, it's like that's a half truth. Yeah. I mean, they're right about the probing, you know, it's this unfortunate case of playing stupid games and then someone else wins stupid

prizes is about to say, I definitely say, if you're if you're if you're big reconnaissance platform looks very similar to an airliner, you may you may wind up with an incident like this occurring, right? Yeah. So it with already strained, you know, US Soviet relations, this was this was not a great situation to be in unless you were Reagan because you wanted that sort of thing, right? Proper lunatic. Yeah. Exactly. Right. But a lot of the long term fallout from this was mitigated because Gorbachev's revisionism collapsed the USSR. God dammit. Yes. Fucking Pizza Hut. Yep. So, you know, history remembers this one as a clearly irresponsible act of aggression by the

Soviet Union, right? Whereas five years later, when the US accidentally shot down Iran Air 655, that was an honest misunderstanding, right? My favorite detail about that is that they gave all of the sailors on on the USS Vincennes the combat action ribbons for that. Oh, that's genuinely true. I'm not saying you're lying. By 1993, you know, the USSR dissolved, it's when Boris Yeltsin finally released the black box, black box recordings, right? Now, this was sort of done in a weird series of things like he gave first they gave the containers for the recordings, but not the recordings themselves. I don't know. I don't know if that was intentional or Yeltsin was just intentional. Yeah. No, you know what? Yeltsin

was drunk. I'll give them the benefit. Yeah. And then they finally released the actual recordings, right? But they were missing the last 10 minutes before the plane crashed. And no one's quite certain why the tape stopped, right? Could be any number of reasons. Yeah. And one piece of fallout from this was, you know, maybe a positive thing is this was the incident that sort of provoked, as Liam said earlier, GPS being open to the public, right? Yeah, I see that on the very last slide now. Yeah. And still, of course, notably does not stop people from shooting down airliners because they think they're military aircraft just mostly now with surface to air missiles rather than air to air. And it's about to say this was we're well past the heyday of accidental

airline shoot downs because that was like 1970 through 1990. But it does still happen occasionally. But it does seem to be more intentional now. You know, it's usually like some insurgents doing it or something. Yeah. Although in the like leaked phone calls, very similar to this, with the sort of Russian backed, well, in fact, Russian surface to air missile crew who who shot down that Malaysian plane MH 17 over Ukraine, they were just like, Oh, yeah, we shot down the Americans lifeline. It's like, guys, same fucking mistake in the same. You guys. Oops, I did it again. It's like a sort of a generational thing, you know,

everyone's got to shoot down an airliner once, you know, it just happens. It makes your hand. Yeah, exactly. It's a rite of passage. Soviet Union did at the Russian Federation has to do it too. Mm hmm. Whatever follows the Russian Federation is going to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So another thing is they were sort of improvements to airplane autopilot systems to make them more intuitive to use, make them more user friendly, make it more obvious when they're on the wrong setting. Yeah, they added a big clippy. Yeah, exactly. Looks like you're

trying to not get shot down by the Soviet Union. Would you like to accidentally take a piece of a new person? Would you like to accidentally do some top gun shit? But it took a couple of months for airflot to be allowed back into the United States. They did do it relatively quickly. It wasn't like a permanent ban, you know, but US Soviet relations were just not good. I believe the Soviet Union was able to take on a bigger role in like air traffic control of airplanes after this. That's good. Yeah. For the like six months that it continued to exist. Exactly, right. And then some guy came and sold all of the radars for scrap. Yeah, by Crocodile.

And then, you know, but one of the things about this is a lot of the information about it didn't come out for a long time. We didn't get the black box for a long time. So we didn't know what was going on on the airplane itself. And, you know, of course, we lost the last 10 minutes, which is where we come to conspiracies. Hell yeah. We're in the Eustica zone. Every one of these is true at the same time. Yes. So, you know, unusual circumstances behind the shootdown, unusual circumstances behind the recovery, lots of missing data. There's lots of conspiracy theories, right? Yeah, sure. It's like high drama. It's like Cold War thriller stuff. Yes. So one theory is that the plane intentionally deviated from its course and was,

you know, maybe a CIA spy mission, right? Or maybe they were trying to probe Soviet air defense again. What if we flew a civilian airliner in there? Huh? What'll happen? Well, this will happen, apparently. You'll kill them all. Funny and like believable for the CIA to care that little but stupid. Yeah. Well, it seems unlikely given the number of fail safes on a 747 and navigational aids and radars and so on and so forth. The pilots would be so catastrophically unaware of their actual location, right? So, you know, plausible, it seems plausible that, you know, they know where they're going. And there's some kind of maybe outlandish misdirection. Maybe the plane didn't actually get shot down. Maybe there was, one theory involves like,

you know, the plane sort of got away. It was extraction and then the US and the USSR got into a fighter dog fight, right? This is based on the testimony. This was based on the testimony of one Japanese fisherman who was in the area at the time. Okay. Yeah. Listen, the testimony of one Japanese fisherman is enough for me. Yeah. And one of the things that once the, once the recordings came out, it was fairly clear that everyone on the flight deck was pretty relaxed. The whole way that they were flying over restricted airspace, you know, they're not like, they don't like tense up as they're like, oh my God, we're going into the USSR. We might get shot down at any second, right? You know, there's not like situational awareness

that they're doing something illegal or risky. So, if it was a spy mission, the pilots were certainly somehow unaware that it was. Or ice cold CIA officers. Oh, yes. Back when CIA officers were hard, instead of now, they just think they get Havana syndrome. Now, there are some questions around why didn't they find any bodies, right? There were some like body parts that washed up in Japan. There were a few body parts that were found by Russian divers, but like in general, the official account says very few bodies are recovered, almost no luggage. You know, nothing from the cargo hold, right? Which is interesting. And there's some theories

as to why this was, right? One theory is that crabs ate all the bodies immediately. I mean, now very frightened of crabs. Totally crabs. That was an unexpected outcome of this episode. It was that I suddenly became much more frightened of crabs than I thought I had any reason to be. These are like those big Japanese spider crabs, you know, with the seven foot long legs. No, thank you. Now, they found a wreck within like, I think it was like within 10 days, they found it. So it's unlikely that crabs worked that fast. So that's maybe not a plausible

explanation. Another idea is that everyone got sucked out of the plane due to explosive decompression, right? You know, so they got sucked out while the plane was still in the air. I mean, this is another interesting thing because a lot of the clothing that was recovered was like, you know, it was like it was like the clothing was there, you know, zipped up, being worn, but there was nothing inside it, right? So they thought maybe people have been sucked out of their clothes. Now, an explosive decompression like that is kind of unlikely, because, you know, the plane still was able, had limited control, you know, the plane. Can you get sucked out of your clothes?

Yeah, that's that's where I don't understand that one. I mean, yeah, I guess you can. But like, that would be a pretty neat trick. As about to say, especially since I don't I don't think the the decompression from one from from like atmosphere. Another theory is the missile damaged the plane in such a way that both the nose and the tail fell off. Just like hollow tube perfectly down to the ground.

So that creates a wind tunnel and that sucks people out of the place. Listen, I've I've played the like a plane mission and tear down, never seen that shit happen. So scientifically, using my scientific expertise, I don't think so. And that that would explain at least why the black box stopped recording, because I think it's powered from fairly far back in the plane. I'm not sure I may be wrong. You know, so that is one theory. And another theory is, of course, Soviet body snatchers. That's absolutely the true one. There was a guy down there with a fucking like shovel hacking them up. And like, yeah, that seems about right. In about 10 days to do it,

they probably could have shoved all the people in a net and just haul them up. Put them in a bunch of garbage bags, bury them on some bullshit island. Another conspiracy theory, which also explains this is, of course, the plane landed safely in Sakhalin, right? And they all turned to be they all wanted to be Soviet. And nothing that ever happened. Yeah, exactly. Or they all got sent to the Gulag, right? Yeah. The John Birch Society likes this theory, as well as I believe there's a media organization, a conservative one called Accuracy and Media.

Should be Accuracy and Airplane Navigation. More like Accuracy and Media. Exactly. So like this is this is one of those conspiracies which requires the USSR to be basically a comic book villain, right? They do evil for the sake of doing evil, right? We've forced the plane to land and then we sent everyone to the Gulag for the hell of it. Why not, right? It's really more of a Stalin move than a then and drop off one. Yeah, I don't I don't even I don't even think Stalin would do that.

I see more. Come on now. The guy the guy who let his own son die in prison wouldn't do that. Yeah, okay. You keep them for some negotiating purposes at least. Yeah, they can stay alive in Gulag for a while. Yeah, but you tell them you have them, right? Does it make sense to just send them to Gulag and not tell anyone? Yeah, you like shoot them up full of LSD and like try and like find out all their secrets. Fine, whatever.

No, no, that's an American thing, Alice. That's bad to say. Show some respect, please. Sorry, I don't mean to disrespect your like program. Yeah, I don't mean to disrespect your folk ways. I'm sorry. It's the Soviet Union would just use vodka, you know. Yeah, we had to get you drunk. They just give you two bottles of vodka and a vial of crocodile and say have at it.

I was about to say one of my little pickles. Yeah, the United States has to design a designer drug to get people to spill secrets and the Soviets just use vodka. And that's one of those cultural differences. So, you know, the another version says the Soviets did something called meekening, right, which is basically you intercept navigational radio signals and then you rebroadcast them to make the pilots think that they were somewhere that they weren't. It's the thing we used to do with bombing aids in the Second World War,

so draw Luftwaffe bombs, of course. And this could be for the purpose of getting Representative Larry McDonald. You know, they want they want to they want to get him, right? Sorry, but like, okay, he's he's anti-communist. He's at least like the head of the job. So does everybody. Like, yeah, like, sorry, but a U.S. Representative is not that important. A Senator, maybe, but like, come on, man.

There are supposed to be two Representatives and a Senator on this flight. But again, they were in a flight behind him. But also, I don't think the USSR is in the mood to do something that provocative. So this is a KGB guy in Alaska, who's like trying to call in that you got to call off the strike, but he just doesn't have like a nickel. So you can't use the payphone. Yeah, exactly. He's like, oh, no, you have to get both the planes. I know, I know, just do it.

The other thing is, I don't think the meekening would have worked if the plane was on INS. That's the other thing, you know. So, you know, because it's everything's referenced internally, right? I don't know enough about autopilot to say that definitively, though, I might be completely wrong. But it's kind of like, I don't know why you would try and, you know, assassinate a representative in such a dramatic fashion. The high-risk low reward comes to mind. Yeah, high-risk reward, yeah.

You know, and the other thing is, you know, if they did intercept and force it down and, you know, you put these people in a gulag, all right, then what? What are you negotiating for? You're just doing pointless escalation. And that's what Ronald Reagan is supposed to be doing, right, you know. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, the most likely conspiracy theory I could think is that, you know, there's aspects of this incident that were covered up by the United States.

You know, for political ends, right? The US is absolutely covering up something here. Fuck if I know what. But like, probably the one thing I've learned from doing this podcast is that whatever it is, it probably has absolutely nothing to do with like Larry MacDonald or anyone else. And it's just like a pure coincidence that like some other CIA shit was happening at the same time. Yeah, it's like, I tend to prefer the mundane situation, which is that they just,

you know, this was a minor fuck-up that was escalated into just a huge fuck-up through like coincidences of where aircraft were at the time. You know, I don't think anyone really got... Well, I mean, obviously, Soviet Union was blamed for it, right? I don't know who suffered consequences, except by means of revisionism. Yeah, you might lose out on your Soviet air defense force suspension, which you will definitely be able to collect in 1991. Right. You just, you know, you just sell your shares in a state corporation to some guy,

you know, for an IOU. That's a great one. And then a couple of months later, you found floating face down in the NSA, absolutely. Exactly. What's happened, Alice? So, yeah, this is, you know, there's aspects of this that are mysterious, but, you know, it seems to me like, well, bad luck. It's sort of like comedy of eras, yeah. Well, it's a good thing that the Cold War is over and we're not going to start a new one

any time soon. Yeah, exactly. Certainly, certainly won't provoke the Chinese into having an accident like this. What are the, what are the flight routes around Taiwan looking like these days? Well, that one, I think, is a little bit more difficult to justify. I don't know, doing a big U over mainland China to get into Taiwan. I don't even say. Perfectly drawing a dick and balls in your flight plan over mainland China. Yeah, pointing right at Beijing.

Well, did I already ask what did we learn? We learned never to allow revisionism into the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Otherwise, as soon your pension will be worthless and you will be unable to afford even the Pizza Hut that has opened in Red Square. They needed to find a young anti-revisionist to run that country. Yeah. You're adding more fossils who have grown soft. All of us are available if anyone's asking.

Two thirds of us are available if anybody's asking. And if anyone wants to. One of us will check himself in the gulok. If you have a Soviet Union that needs running, ask Alice or I. We will step up to the task. That's right. We will do that for you, the people, our truest love. I cannot be bothered, of course.

No, of course. You're too busy doing like break-like clinics. Yeah. I'm the vanguard at the revolution. God damn it. Not very exciting, it turns out. Outside the Yorca Conference, changing the break lights. If you are a loved one, it's been affected by revisionism.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Thirds. This is what you see on the screen in front of you is a plastic keg, something which I was not aware existed until this email came in. No, it was very flimsy. That's what white keg. That's wine kegs, man. I mean, they have a wine keg. They have a wine caiman kegs.

Oh, hell yeah. There's keg wine. I've never I've never been. Is that like a caterer thing? Like you need to do a bunch of wine? No. No. Oh, okay.

Apparently this one is for beer. It is a one way keg, right? We used to deal with wine kegs at the liquor store occasionally. The draft wine had a moment a couple of years ago. I thought it, you know, had a shit and piss in its own mouth. Which normally I would find erotic, but. Of course. A draft wine, God.

Hello, WTYP crew and possibly guest. Nope, no guest. We killed them all. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. I hope you all are doing well. Get the fuck up.

I have a safety third from the restaurant industry that involves knives, guns and explosions. Let's go. A while ago, I worked in a restaurant that served draft beer. Before the beer gets poured, it lives in kegs in a big refrigerated room behind the taps. I don't like saying it lives. I mean, it's got yeast in it. I guess it does. It lives.

Yeah. Normally these kegs were metal and got sent away for a deposit when emptied. But one day we ended up with two plastic kegs, demonstration image attached, that for whatever reason couldn't be returned and instead needed to be thrown out. Now, this is an aside from me. I looked these things up after seeing this and there was a whole bunch of websites like we make plastic kegs. They're sustainable one-way keg solutions, right?

And then I read some stuff from folks in the restaurant industry and like, oh yeah, these all get thrown in the garbage. Nothing gets recycled. Now, the kegs sometimes had a buildup of pressure in them even after all the beer was gone. And because the people who ran the dump are fascists who frown on things like impromptu bombs. That's not what it says. That's not what it says. No, we're doing a little bit of censorship here.

That's not what it says. As is our want to... As is our want living in the top left corner of this political compass. Revisionist scum. No, I'm being anti-revisionist. You are being revisionist. You're literally advising what the nice listener wrote in. That's not what revisionism is.

It doesn't matter. The revisionist... The fucking... Okay, so the traitor who sent in the safety third used the word communists. Yes. And I decided that for the purposes of political education... You know how annoying it is to have to claim you two as comrades? For the purposes of left unity.

Yes. Yeah, you know how annoying left unity is? I'm just like, yep, out here with my two communist pals. God damn it. Who frown on things like impromptu bombs being mixed in with the rest of the trash they receive. Part of the procedure for getting rid of these plastic kegs was to let the pressure out. My understanding is this was normally done by slowly bleeding pressure out of a valve on the keg. Unfortunately, this process was not fast enough for our chef.

Well, there is one word for describing a very fast release of pressure. Yes. Catastrophic. I was going to say explosion, but yeah. Yes. After being warned what he was doing was monumentally stupid. He dragged one of the kegs into the parking lot next to the restaurant and stabbed it with a kitchen knife.

Oh my god, dude. I hope he wasn't leaning over it. Remember what I said about these kegs being potential bombs when they still had pressure in them? This particular keg had quite a lot of pressure in it, and as soon as the knife punctured the plastic, there was a tremendous bang as the keg peeled itself apart like an orange in about a fraction of a second. Oh. Seeing as how he was holding the knife, the chef's arm took a beating as the explosion transferred

much of its force into his hand, fracturing several bones. Ah, you don't need both arms to be a chef. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like it's not like being a surgeon. Weight savings. Yeah. There's a lightning kid on the chef. Luckily, he didn't suffer any other injuries, though his hand was in a brace for several weeks afterwards.

I would like the story to end here, but it doesn't. As I said, there were two of these kegs that needed to be disposed of, and it turned out the main lesson learned from keg one was not that pressure vessel plus violence equals bad things. It was that pressure vessel plus close range violence equals bad things. Oh, no. This was easy enough to solve as the management were good Americans, and the next day the second keg was taken out in the woods and shot.

Good. That wasn't the drop I meant to play. What I meant to play was... The second keg taken out into the woods and shot for a revisionist crime. Revisionist, yeah, exactly. The second keg was liquidated. Yeah. Got NKVD, yeah. It was a chance to pass, and it was dealt accordingly. It's fine.

Yeah, going out into the woods with a macarof and a keg full of draft beer. Don't worry about you. Don't worry about me. Yeah. Keep up the good work, guys. Very stoked to hear about the Boston Molasses Flood next episode. Now I can play this drop. Shake hands for danger. That is our next episode of the Boston Molasses Disaster. The Boston Molasses Disaster, the Molassica, if you will.

Anyone have any commercials before we go? Kill James Bond, 10,000 Molasses, Lions Lab by Donkeys, Franklin in VR, the Franklin Metaverse experience. Oh, my God. You don't want to do that? You don't want to do Franklin in VR? Frame rate would be really bad. Frame rate is already really bad. You have 3,800 mods.

Yeah, but frame rate in VR is very, very important, so you don't throw up. I don't know. I can live with it. I can watch a very valid poll. Hold the beauty of 19th century Franklin and his vomit copiously into a trash can. I have on my lap for the purpose. That's hungover rise. Wondrous things. All right, we good?

We good? Yeah, I think that's the end of the podcast. All right.