Jumbo Jet Strays Near Soviet Base

A Japan Air Lines plane en route last week from Tokyo to Paris via Moscow strayed off course and apparently was approached by Soviet jet fighters in an area not far from where a Korean airliner was shot down in 1983, it was disclosed Thursday.

The pilot, Morihiko Nishioka, admitted that he had forgotten to reset the plane’s inertial navigation system, the automatic instruments that guide a plane on a preset course, causing the plane to stray 69 miles off course. He apologized at a news conference “for upsetting the public.”

Takao Fujinami, the chief Cabinet secretary, said the errors involved in the incident, which occurred Oct. 31, were unforgiveable.

In addition to the pilot’s error, the cockpit crew failed to hear a warning sent by a Japanese radar station because the radio volume was turned down and also neglected to verify the aircraft’s position at one checkpoint.

Crew Grounded

Transportation Ministry officials issued a “serious warning” to the airline. JAL said the pilot, his co-pilot and navigator have been grounded indefinitely.

Foreign Ministry officials said JAL Flight 411 was routed through a Soviet air lane but was about to enter a prohibited zone west of Soviet-held Sakhalin Island when the incident occurred.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone said he was informed of the incident immediately after it occurred. Public disclosure was delayed to permit officials to check the aircraft’s flight recorder and question the cockpit crew, he said.

The pilot, Nishioka, 39, said he had encountered turbulence northwest of the city of Niigata, at the first checkpoint after takeoff, and had taken manual control of the aircraft. It was at that point that the plane made a 45-degree turn to the north and was supposed to head straight toward the Siberia coast east of Khabarovsk.

After passing through the turbulence, however, Nishioka forgot to reset the inertial navigation system. Neither his co-pilot nor the navigator noticed a light in the panel showing that the aircraft was still on manual control. A westerly wind pushed the aircraft off course.

The pilot compounded the error by checking only the direction of his flight, but not his position, when he passed the second checkpoint out of Tokyo. When the pilot finally realized his error, it took six minutes for the plane to correct its course by making a sharp turn to the left.

The aircraft, a Boeing 747 carrying 132 passengers and crew, strayed 69 miles from its course while over international waters between the Siberian coast and Sakhalin, where important Soviet military bases are situated. The passengers were unaware of the pilot’s error.

Near KAL Site

Two minutes before Nishioka became aware that he was off course, a Japanese military radar station in northern Hokkaido radioed the aircraft but received no reply. The radar station reported tracking “several aircraft” believed to have been Soviet fighters that were scrambled to intercept the airliner, but Nishioka told reporters that no one in his cockpit crew saw any Soviet aircraft. There was no official word on how close the Soviet fighters came to the JAL plane.

At one point, the plane flew 62 miles west of the point at which Korean Air Lines Flight 007, also a 747 jumbo jet, was shot down, killing all 269 persons aboard, Transportation Ministry officials said.

After the KAL incident, Japanese military radar stations were instructed to report to civilian aviation authorities any sightings of aircraft off course in the northern area near the Soviet Union. When the radar station at Wakkanai, Japan, spotted what later was identified as the KAL aircraft on Sept. 1, 1983, it made no such report.

This time, it contacted air controllers at Sapporo, Japan. Because the JAL aircraft was already out of their radio range, Sapporo air controllers twice called Khabarovsk air controllers and asked if the JAL plane had made contact with them. The first time Khabarovsk controllers said they had not yet heard from the plane. The second time they replied, “It’s flying smoothly.”

“OK, thank you,” the Sapporo air controllers replied, without disclosing why they had called.

No Soviet Protest

Foreign Ministry officials said the Soviet government has not registered any protest in connection with the incident. Nor, they said, has the incident been reported by the Soviet press.

Japanese diplomats said an air safety agreement signed in Tokyo last month by Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, which provides for a communications network linking Tokyo, Anchorage, Alaska, and Khabarovsk, in Siberia, may have helped avert a repetition of the KAL disaster.

Last week’s incident, however, differed from the KAL disaster in that it occurred in daylight, rather than in the waning hours of a moonless night, and involved an aircraft on a scheduled flight over Soviet territory.