Nord Koreansk desertør anno 1953 - Stars & Stripes

 

The MiG Fury Fighters perform a flyover July 13, 2019, the “Mission Over Malmstrom” open house event on Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. The two-day event, featured performances by aerial demonstration teams, flyovers, and static displays. (Airman 1st Class Tristan Truesde)

Kenneth Rowe, who piloted North Korean warplane to freedom, dies at 90 On a clear morning in late September 1953, seven weeks after the Korean War armistice, crews at the U.S.-run Kimpo Air Base near Seoul were astonished to see an unannounced warplane roaring in from the north. The jet was coming the wrong way on the takeoff patterns. Its wings were rocking and lights flashing. The North Korean pilot at the controls, Lt. No Kum-Sok, was trying to signal that he was not attacking. He was defecting. About 15 minutes earlier, the 21-year-old airman had banked away from a North Korean patrol. The demilitarized zone, separating the Korean Peninsula, was on the horizon. He pushed his Soviet-made MiG-15 to its limits, climbing to 23,000 feet over the no man’s land of the DMZ and then barreling down into South Korea at more than 600 mph. In a stroke of luck, the U.S. radar system was down for maintenance. When he touched down at Kimpo, his snub-nosed MiG nearly collided with an F-86 Sabre that had just landed at the other end of the runway. So began his new life in the whirlwind of Cold War politics and propaganda. His plane was a major military coup, handing the Americans the first intact model of the latest MiG-15bis that was a main adversary of the F-86s in the 1950-1953 Korean War. The pilot later moved to the United States - with the media on hand for front-page coverage of his arrival - changed his name to Kenneth Hill Rowe and caused ripples through President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration over whether to pay a $100,000 bounty promised to any defector who came across with a MiG. He eventually received it after the president relented.