Posthumous praise for pilot

Press, 24 July 1984, Page 14

Posthumous praise for pilot

NZPA-AFP Moscow The Soviet Defence Ministry’s “Krasnaya Zvezda” (Red Star), lavished posthumous praise on a Soviet pilot who deliberately crashed his jet fighter into an enemy aircraft which had violated Soviet air space. The paper did not give the date or place of the incident, or the aircraft involved, but said that the pilot, Captain G. Elisseev, had been made a hero of the Soviet Union. Analysts said the article appeared to give indirect approval to the shooting

down on September 1 last of a South Korean jumbo jet carrying 269 passengers. The pilot who fired on the Korean airliner appeared on television nine days after the downing but his identity has never been revealed. In the editorial, which expounded on the qualities required of Soviet military personnel, “Red Star” said Captain Elisseev had not hesitated to sacrifice his own life in order to bring down an “enemy” aircraft which had violated Soviet airspace. Captain Elisseev, who had been ordered to intercept

the trespassing aircraft, found himself “in a difficult position, because the intruder looked like getting away unpunished,” “Red Star” said. To prevent this, the pilot accelerated his aircraft to full speed and crashed himself into the other plane, destroying it and putting an end to “an enemy provocation.” “Red Star” said Captain Elisseev had shown “vigilance,” and a “high sense of military duty (and) ideological conviction.” The Soviet Union has always maintained that the

Korean Air Lines 747 shot down over Sakhalin Island was on a spying mission and that Soviet pilots had paused for two hours before firing on the aircraft. The “spy plane” version was reaffirmed by Tass news agency after a recent British television broadcast on the incident. According to Tass, “former members of the United States Secret Service general staff as well as military pilots” said during the broadcast that the intrusion of the K.A.L. jetliner in Soviet airspace “was not accidental but premediated.”