My involvement with KAL-007 happened due to a number of coincidences. In 1993 my first international assignment as a field engineer for Schlumberger I was posted to a small fishing village north of Niigata. I was given my own vehicle and on the first day travelling to site I stopped to take a break and took this photo.
I didn’t know it at the time but this was looking directly at the final resting place of KAL-007, over 800Km from the official crash site. I didn’t cross my mind that I would return in 8 years, then again in 32 years collecting debris from KAL-007 in this spot.
In 2000 I was assigned to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. It was a fascinating place full of Cold War history.
I made friends with a few Russians and two of these friends were sons of the divers who took part in the original search for KAL-007. They were adamant that no passenger aircraft came down anywhere near Sakhalin due to absence of any debris, bodies or baggage. I’d never really thought about the incident before as I was just a kid at the time but I was intrigued so purchased many books on the subject.
Many of the books were convinced that the aircraft deviated intentionally, other books attempted to explain an accidental course but ultimately the end result was the Russians shot the plane down. One book stood apart from all the others and that was Michel Brun’s, “Incident at Sakhalin” You can download it for free here https://www.scribd.com/document/528677213/Incident-at-Sakhalin#content=query:pratt,pageNum:68,indexOnPage:0,bestMatch:false
To summarise the book extremely quickly Brun’s theory was KAL-007 did not overfly Russia, was not shot down by the Soviets but continued flying at least another 50 minutes where it was taken down by “Vincennes syndrome” ..i.e. unknown friendly fire. There were a number of well documented examples to back up his thesis with one of these being finding the wreckage much further south (almost down to Niigata) on the west coast of Japan.
There are two currents on the west coast of Japan. One is the Tsushima current that always flows north. It splits to form the Tsugaru current which flows between the main Island of Honshu and Hokkaido. This meant any debris that washed ashore south of Akita must have come from a location south of this area showing the official crash location is incorrect.
Since Brun had collected debris in good condition 8 years after the incident, I thought there would be a chance there would still be debris after 21 years. Conveniently at the time my girl friend lived in Tokyo so on my next days off I travelled to Akita and started walking south. For the first 4 hrs I found nothing but I knew Brun had traversed this area before me. Suddenly I came to an area obviously not swept by Brun and found my first piece of honeycomb debris.
It was just sitting there, high on the beach. Within another 500m I’d found another piece
I found a further piece of honey comb within another km plus a number of other interesting artefacts. I couldn’t carry anymore so abandoned searching further but I had confirmed Brun’s basic thesis that the crash site was much further south, most likely in the region just north of Sado Island.
I made another search attempt on Awashima Island but found no wreckage. However, this island was extremely rugged with no easy access to the coast so I only searched a few km so would not be a definitive search. Soon I was transferred out of the area and put the few pieces of wreckage into storage.