Finnair flight AY 915

Finnair flight AY 915 was a scheduled flight by Finnair from Tokyo, Japan, over the North Pole to Helsinki, Finland, on 23 December 1987. The Soviet Union fired a missile which exploded it less than 30 seconds before impact. The incident came out only in September 2014, when Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper, published an extensive article on the matter.^[1]

File:PolarRoute.png

Polar routes in different decades. Routes over the Arctic on the left and in the centre (the Finnair route not marked); routes over the Antarctica on the right.

Background[edit]

Western airlines had been flying over the northern polar regions since 1954, when the Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) began scheduled flights on the route Copenhagen – Søndre Strømfjord – Winnipeg – Los Angeles with Douglas DC-6Bs. Since 1957 SAS had been flying from Europe to Tokyo using Douglas DC-7 aircraft.

Finnair had been the first airline in the world to fly non-stop scheduled flights between Europe and Japan since 1983. The aircraft they used were McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30ERs, which had extra fuel tanks that enabled the plane to take on 24 000 litres of additional fuel. This made it possible to cover the 10 024 kilometres from Tokyo to Helsinki on a non-stop flight that lasted 13 hours. The flight was carried out in international air space, over the North Pole, since the Soviet Union had demanded extra payments for flights over its territory in Siberia, in addition to ordinary navigation fees. The range of the aircraft of other western airlines did not allow for such flights, and they landed in Anchorage, Alaska, for refuelling. Japanese airlines did not fly non-stop over Siberia, as they thought that the Soviet Union would have demanded bilateral flight rights in return.^[1]

The flight[edit]

The Finnair aircraft had taken off from Tokyo almost on schedule, around 10 a.m. Japanese time (3 a.m. Finnish time), and it carried 201 passengers, four pilots, and 12 Finnish and 2 Japanese flight attendants. The cruising altitude was 10 600 metres (32 000 ft).

The flight proceeded north from Tokyo to Bering Strait and on over the North Pole and then south toward Svalbard and on toward Helsinki. On these flights, the passengers were given certificates of “Flying over the North Pole”, which was a route map supplied with the name of the captain of the plane.^[1]

The events[edit]

When the aircraft was over the Edgeøya island of Svalbard, between 1 and 2 p.m. Finnish time, the assistant pilot in command Esko Kaukiainen and assistant first officer Markku Soininen saw a rocket approach the aircraft ahead, at 30 degrees from the plane. The pilot in command and the first officer were having a rest at the time. Visibility was good, and the pilots followed the flight of the rocket for more than half a minute. At first they thought it was a Soviet weather rocket on its way to the troposphere, but when it had reached the cruising altitude of the aircraft, it turned and came straight at it. Then the rocket exploded.

The equipment of the aircraft allowed the crew to determine their position. After the explosion, Kaukiainen started a stopwatch. A little over a minute later the aircraft came to the dust cloud left by the explosion. With the cruising speed of the aircraft being 900 km/h and that of the missile at least 1 800 km/h, the pilots calculated that the explosion had taken place only about 20 seconds before impact.

The pilot in command came to the cockpit later and took care of the landing at about 4 p.m. Finnish time. The pilots who had been in the cockpit during the events reported orally to him.^[1]

Conjectures about the events[edit]

The pilots were in no doubt as to where the missile came from: it came from the Soviet Union. They surmised that it had been fired from the Kola Peninsula. When they talked to Helsingin Sanomat in 2014, they said they thought it had been some kind of exercise. They thought that either things had gone as planned in the exercise, or then they had gone wrong. In case it had gone according to plan, it meant that the Finnair aircraft had been used for target practice. One possibility they had considered was that it was a missile gone astray, as had been the case three years previously with the so-called Lake Inari missile in the north of Finland.^[1]

In 2014, a few days after the Helsingin Sanomat article appeared, the paper published two letters-to-the-editor, in which readers considered the events. One suggestion was that the missile had been fired from Plesetsk near Arkhangelsk, and that it had been connected to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces or INF Treaty ratified between the United States and the Soviet Union ratified in early 1987, calling for the elimination of intermediate-range ballistic missiles.^[2] However, this supposition was refuted, as it was pointed out that the elimination of these missiles began only in late July the following year. Instead, the second writer supported the idea that the rocket had been a surface-to-air missile.^[3] The first writer also suggested that the events could have been connected to the Soviets testing their missile defense systems.^[2]

The lack of reports[edit]

The pilots had agreed that the pilot in command would file a report after the flight. However, it seems he never did do it. When the Helsingin Sanomat article came out in 2014, he had already died. Mr. Lauri J. Laine, retired director of flights for Finnair at the time, confirmed that no report was ever written about the incident.

However, the events had been discussed within Finnair, especially in pilot training, and Kaukiainen related them to at least one official within the Finnish Civil Aviation Administration which in 2014 is called Finavia. But it turned out that there was little interest in the matter within the Finnish government, due to the heavy atmosphere of Finlandization in the country. In 2014 the Finnish Transport Safety Agency TraFi had no knowledge of the matter, and reports or flight log books for 1987 no longer existed.^[1]

References[edit]

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 Huhtanen, Ann-Mari (7 September 2014). "Perhana, se tulee suoraan kohti. Jouluna 1987 Finnairin lento AY 915 oli matkalla Tokiosta Helsinkiin, kun Huippuvuorten kohdalla konetta lähestyi ohjus". Helsingin Sanomat. Sanoma: C 6–8. Retrieved 2014-09-21. Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 Rislakki, Jukka (2014-09-09). "Tuliko ohjus Plesetskistä?". Helsingin Sanomat: B 10 (letters-to-the-editor). Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)
↑ Forss, Stefan (2014-09-12). "Ampuiko NL ilmatorjuntaohjuksen?". Helsingin Sanomat: B 12 (letters-to-the-editor). Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)

Coordinates: 79°49′N 023°00′E / 79.817°N 23.000°E / 79.817; 23.000

⧼validator-fatal-error⧽

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[Sunnuntaisivut-1] 1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 Huhtanen, Ann-Mari (7 September 2014). "Perhana, se tulee suoraan kohti. Jouluna 1987 Finnairin lento AY 915 oli matkalla Tokiosta Helsinkiin, kun Huippuvuorten kohdalla konetta lähestyi ohjus". Helsingin Sanomat. Sanoma: C 6–8. Retrieved 2014-09-21. Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)

[Rislakki-2] 2.0 ^2.1 Rislakki, Jukka (2014-09-09). "Tuliko ohjus Plesetskistä?". Helsingin Sanomat: B 10 (letters-to-the-editor). Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)

[3] Forss, Stefan (2014-09-12). "Ampuiko NL ilmatorjuntaohjuksen?". Helsingin Sanomat: B 12 (letters-to-the-editor). Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (help)

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