One other interesting thing I learned as a result of this thread: rather amazingly, KAL 007 was actually the SECOND South Korean airliner in less than a decade that was shot down by the Soviet "ВВС" (Военно-Воздушные Силы, "Air Force"), after blundering into USSR airspace as a result of navigational errors!!

In April 1978, KAL 902 was flying with 109 people on board from Paris to Seoul (via Anchorage) by a trans-polar route. When the flight was passing over the North Pole, the magnetic compasses failed, and the flight crew attempted to navigate by visual sightings of the sun. The result of this was that the plane made an almost 180° U-turn and entered Soviet airspace over Murmansk, east of northern Finland. As in the KAL 007 incident, the plane was initially suspected to be a US Air Force RC-135; Soviet military pilots in the air visually confirmed that it was a civilian plane, but were ordered by superiors on the ground to open fire.

But this incident ended much less tragically -- two passengers were killed by shrapnel from the Soviet missile strike, but the plane made a safe emergency landing, and the other 107 survived and were taken into custody. The passengers were released and flown to Finland after two days, while the civilian airline crew members were held a little longer (and forced to make a public "apology" for political purposes), but also released.

Since the plane was "embarrassingly far" into Soviet airspace before it was finally intercepted by fighter planes, some analysts think that this incident contributed to the over-zealous response of the Soviet Air Force in the KAL 007 incident less than six years later.

P.S. I was not even 7 years old when the KAL 902 incident took place, which is probably why I don't recall ever hearing about it until now -- I certainly remember the news reports about KAL 007, by which time I was almost 12 and in junior-high school.

P.P.S. On ru.wikipedia, the articles about the shootdowns are called Инцидент с южнокорейским Боингом [1978] and Инцидент с южнокорейским Боингом [1983] ("Incident with a South Korean Boeing, 1978/1983") as though they were talking about two movies with the same title!