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Finnair Flight 915 (AY915) was a scheduled flight by Finnair from Tokyo, Japan, over the North Pole to Helsinki, Finland, on 23 December 1987. In 2014, Finnish media reported a claim by two of the flight’s pilots that the Soviet Union had fired a missile at the aircraft, which exploded less than 30 seconds before impact. The allegations came out only in September 2014, when ''Helsingin Sanomat'', the leading Finnish daily newspaper, published an extensive article on the matter. The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation YLE reported on the article in the internet the same day. When the matter came out, it caused outrage in Finland among those politicians and civil servants, to whom it should have been reported at the time,〔 and it was widely publicised and commented upon in the Finnish media, amidst allegations of Finlandization. The alleged incident has been compared to other similar incidents involving the Soviet Union, such as the Finnish Kaleva in 1940, Korean Air Lines Flight 902 in 1978, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. Co-captain Kaukiainen said that the Finnair pilots decided to speak out on the matter after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down in Ukraine on 17 July 2014.〔 ==Background== Western airlines had been flying over the northern polar regions since 1954, when the Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) began scheduled flights on the route Copenhagen – Søndre Strømfjord – Winnipeg – Los Angeles with Douglas DC-6Bs. Since 1957 SAS had been flying from Europe to Tokyo using Douglas DC-7 aircraft. Finnair had been the first airline in the world to fly non-stop scheduled flights between Europe and Japan since 1983. The aircraft they used were McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30ERs, which had extra fuel tanks fitted in the cargo space that enabled the plane to take on 24,000 liters (6,340 gallons) of additional fuel. This made it possible to cover the 10 024 kilometres from Tokyo to Helsinki on a non-stop flight that lasted 13 hours. The flight was carried out in international air space, over the North Pole, since the Soviet Union had demanded extra payments for flights over its territory in Siberia, in addition to ordinary navigation fees. The range of the aircraft of other western airlines did not allow for such flights, and they landed in Anchorage, Alaska, for refuelling. Japanese airlines did not fly non-stop over Siberia, as they thought that the Soviet Union would have demanded bilateral flight rights in return.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Finnair Flight 915」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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