Editing Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (section)

===Initial ICAO investigation (1983)===
The [[International Civil Aviation Organization]] (ICAO) had only one experience of investigation of an air disaster before the KAL&nbsp;007 shoot-down. This was the incident of February 21, 1973, when [[Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114]] was shot down by Israeli F-4 jets over the Sinai Peninsula. ICAO convention required the state in whose territory the incident had taken place (the Soviet Union) to conduct an investigation together with the country of registration (South Korea), the country whose air traffic control the aircraft was flying under (Japan), as well as the country of the aircraft's manufacturer (US).

The ICAO investigation, led by Caj Frostell,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.isasi.org/reachout_members.html#Frostell |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100402225923/http://www.isasi.org/reachout_members.html |archive-date=April 2, 2010 |title=ISASI – Air Safety Through Accident Investigation |publisher=Isasi.org |date=January 1, 2004 |access-date=August 15, 2012 |url-status=dead}}</ref> did not have the authority to compel the states involved to hand over evidence, instead having to rely on what they voluntarily submitted.<ref>Johnson, p. 231</ref> Consequently, the investigation did not have access to sensitive evidence such as radar data, intercepts, ATC tapes, or the [[Flight Data Recorder]] (FDR) and [[Cockpit Voice Recorder]] (CVR) (whose discovery the U.S.S.R. had kept secret). A number of simulations were conducted with the assistance of Boeing and [[Litton Industries|Litton]] (the manufacturer of the navigation system).<ref>Johnson, p. 232</ref>

The ICAO released their report on December 2, 1983, which concluded that the violation of Soviet airspace was accidental: One of two explanations for the aircraft's deviation was that the [[autopilot]] had remained in <small>HEADING</small> hold instead of [[Inertial navigation|<small>INS</small> mode]] after departing [[Anchorage, Alaska|Anchorage]]. They postulated that this [[Air navigation|inflight navigational error]] was caused by either the crew's failure to select <small>INS</small> mode or the inertial navigation not activating when selected because the aircraft was already too far off track.<ref name="NASA"/> It was determined that the crew did not notice this error or subsequently perform navigational checks, which would have revealed that the aircraft was diverging further and further from its assigned route. This was later deemed to be caused by a "lack of situational awareness and flight deck coordination".<ref name="ICAO 2"/>

The report included a statement by the Soviet Government claiming "no remains of the victims, the instruments or their components or the flight recorders have so far been discovered".<ref>Appendix F, ICAO 83</ref> This statement was subsequently shown to be untrue by [[Boris Yeltsin]]'s release in 1993 of a November 1983 [[Memorandum|memo]] from [[KGB]] head [[Viktor Chebrikov]] and Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov to Yuri Andropov. This memo stated, "In the third decade of October this year the equipment in question (the recorder of in-flight parameters and the recorder of voice communications by the flight crew with ground air traffic surveillance stations and between themselves) was brought aboard a search vessel and forwarded to Moscow by air for decoding and translation at the Air Force Scientific Research Institute."<ref>[[Izvestia]] #228, October 16, 1992</ref> The Soviet Government statement would further be contradicted by Soviet civilian divers who later recalled that they viewed the wreckage of the aircraft on the bottom of the sea for the first time on September 15, two weeks after the plane had been shot down.<ref>May 7, 1991, p. 6</ref>

Following the publication of the report, the ICAO adopted a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for the attack.<ref name="Merrills">Merrills, p. 61</ref> Furthermore, the report led to a unanimous amendment in May 1984—though not coming into force until October 1, 1998—to the [[Convention on International Civil Aviation]] that defined the use of force against civilian airliners in more detail.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.icao.int/ICDB/HTML/English/Representative%20Bodies/Council/Working%20Papers%20by%20Session/158/C.158.WP.11186.en/C.158.WP.11186.EN.HTM |publisher=[[International Civil Aviation Organization]] |date=March 5, 1999 |title=Infractions of the Convention On International Civil Aviation |access-date=January 6, 2009 |location=Montreal |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030924015049/http://www.icao.int/ICDB/HTML/English/Representative%20Bodies/Council/Working%20Papers%20by%20Session/158/C.158.WP.11186.en/C.158.WP.11186.EN.HTM |archive-date=September 24, 2003}}</ref> The amendment to section 3(d) reads in part: "The contracting States recognize that every State must refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight and that, in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://intelligence.senate.gov/perureport.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040124025158/http://intelligence.senate.gov/perureport.pdf |archive-date=January 24, 2004 |title=A Review of United States Assistance to Peruvian Counter-Drug Air Interdiction Efforts and the Shootdown of a Civilian Aircraft on April 20, 2001 |publisher=Select Committee on Intelligence |date=October 2001 |access-date=February 14, 2009}}</ref>