Talk:Burning Wind

This article needs serious work.

^ Yep, just flagged it with cleanup/written like personal essay. Doesn't belong on wiki at all the way its written.
 * Should that entire section just be moved to Korean Air Lines Flight 007? It's not directly relevant to this article. --Nucleusboy 19:20, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

This is opinion, and not much fact.
As someone who flew on the Burning Wind missions (but not this particular mission) I can tell you that there are many inaccuracies and matters of opinion in this article.

First of all, by the time the KAL flight was downed, the RC-135 had already been back on the ground for an hour.

The RC-135 does not have an air to air radar, therefore could not have "seen" the KAL 747. What it does have in that bulbous nose is a GROUND mapping radar, used for navigation purposes.

As far as "seeing the Soviet radars lighting up", just because you see a radar active doesn't mean that you have any indication of anything out of the ordinary. Those same radars would have been up to track the RC-135.

There was nobody that the RC-135 could have warned. They were not in contact with KAL-007 (and had no reason to be), and would not have been in contact with any ground controllers, either.

As far as reporting goes, I assure you that if this sort of incident was to be detected by any RC-135, there is a requirement to have the information on the President's desk within 15 minutes of the incident being detected.

Your information from your "inside source" was likely a ground maintenance technician who, while having the security clearance to board and work on the aircraft, did not have the "need to know" about any of the intelligence-collection activities that went on onboard the aircraft. Since the mission landed an hour before the attack, there was no way they could have said "watch CNN", because nothing had happened yet.

CNN didn't become the phenomenon it is today until Operation Desert Storm (which I was also part of). It had only been broadcasting since 1980, and not many people watched it yet.

Finally, what reporting DID happen came from ground-based collection assets in northern Japan, which I cannot discuss.

Just to provide my bonafides: I spent 6.5 years flying the RC-135 out of Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan, and RAF Mildenhall, UK.

Suggestion
Suggest that this article be converted into a redirect link back to the RC-135/Rivet Joint pages. Burning Wind missions are only conducted using RC-135 variants at this time and have no meaning outside of that context. --BurningWind 20:25, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Critique of the opinion above
1. "First of all, by the time the KAL flight was downed, the RC-135 had already been back on the ground for an hour." Yes, This is absolutely true. But KAL 007 was downed over Sakhalin island. And the RC-135 was in the air only 75 NM (U.S. Gov. sourced) from KAL 007 when both were off Kamchatka, the first entrance of KAL 007 into Soviet territory.

2."The RC-135 does not have an air to air radar, therefore could not have "seen" the KAL 747."

Yes, that is so. But the crewman that flew with the RC-135 crew from Shemya Island back to Alaska, did not say that the crew reported seeing KAL 007 by radar. He reported that the Russian language translaters heard the chatter and what was "seen" by the RC-135's "ravens" were the radar on Kamchatka lighting up, not KAL 007 itself.

3. "There was nobody that the RC-135 could have warned. They were not in contact with KAL-007 (and had no reason to be), and would not have been in contact with any ground controllers, either."

For the way the RC-135 could have warned KAL 007 via use of the "Critic Report", see the following from a supervisor of these RC-135 flights and 89.138.147.180BertSchlossberg89.138.147.180

Deletion of KAL-007 Section
I deleted the entire section about the KAL-007 shootdown. There is no relationship between that event and any Burning Wind mission. Even the author of that section states that the RC-135 that Soviet Air Defense allegedly mistook KAL-007 for was on a Cobra Ball mission. Burning Wind and Cobra Ball are completely different operations that employ different variants of the RC-135. In other words an RC-135 configured for Burning Wind can't be flown for Cobra Ball, and vice versa. For that reason alone, assuming any truth to it, the KAL-007 shootdown does not belong in this article.

In any case, Soviet Air Defense did not mistake KAL-007 for an RC-135 of any type. The Soviet interceptor pilot clearly identified KAL-007 as a civilian jetliner to ground control before requesting and then receiving permission to destroy it. The Soviets knew what they were doing.

These facts were all public knowledge soon after the events and well-established by the evidence, and so ignoring them to promote a connection between RC-135 operations and the shootdown of KAL-007 amounts to conspiracy-theorizing.

Wm Tingley (talk) 15:11, 11 June 2008 (UTC)