Flying Targets: Armed Attacks Against Civil Aviation

1. U Thant, A View from the U.N. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1978) p. 302.

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2. Israel found it ludicrous for the Assembly to condemn acts of air piracy and then ‘welcome’ an organisation which, it claimed, had been responsible for 54 attacks on airlines and airports. (ICAO Doc. A-22 Min P/12). See also ‘PLO Terror: Data on the PLO Terrorist Organization’ in Yonah Alexander (ed.), The 1986 Annual Terrorism (Dordrecht: Martinus Nyhoff, 1987); Yonah Alexander and Joshua Sinai, Terrorism: the PLO Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1989).

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3. Excerpts from the verbatim record of the Security Council debate are contained in William Stevenson, 90 Minutes at Entebbe (New York: Bantam Books, 1976)

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4. John F. Murphy, ‘State Self Help and Problems of Public International Law’ in Alona E. Evans and John Murphy (eds), Legal Aspects of International Terrorism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1978) p. 556.

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5. Gregory V. Goodings, ‘Fighting Terrorism in the 1980’s: The Interception of the Achille Lauro hijackers’, The Yale Journal of International Law, 12 (1), Winter 1987, p. 175.

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6. Oliver J. Lissitzyn, ‘The Treatments of Aerial Intruders in Recent Practice and International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 47 (1953), p. 559.

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7. On the basis of skimpy press reports, James Oberg asserts that the chartered cargo aircraft inadvertently entered Soviet airspace in Azerbaijan on its way back to Cyprus after delivering weapons to Iran and was deliberately rammed by a Soviet interceptor aircraft when it ignored instructions to land. Argentina never acknowledged the incident. James Oberg, Uncovering Soviet Disasters (New York: Random House, 1988) pp. 32–9.

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8. Report of the ICAO Fact-Finding Investigation, C-WP/7764, p. 56. ICAO investigators were hampered by the absence of the black boxes and survivors. They had to proceed on the basis of limited hard evidence, limited facts, circumstantial evidence, assumptions and calculations. Some of their key findings were based on postulations which were then simulated to provide the most likely scenarios of what may have transpired. Gerald F. FitzGerald, ‘The Use of Force Against Civil Aircraft: The Aftermath of the KAL Flight 007 Inciden’, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, 22 (1984), pp. 295–6.

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9. The most authoritative book on the KAL tragedy is a two-year study by Seymour Hersh: The Target Is Destroyed (New York: Random House, 1986)

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10. Alexander Dallin, Black Box: KAL and the Superpowers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

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11. R.W. Johnson in Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986).

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