Aircraft from USS Midway and USS Enterprise repeatedly overflew Soviet military installations in the disputed Kuril Islands during FleetEx '83,[29] resulting in the dismissal or reprimanding of Soviet military officials who had been unable to shoot them down.[30] On the Soviet side, RYAN was expanded.[30] Lastly, there was a heightened alert around the Kamchatka Peninsula at the time KAL 007 was in the vicinity, because of a Soviet missile test that was scheduled for the same day. A United States Air Force Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying in the area was monitoring the missile test off the peninsula.[31]
At 15:51 UTC, according to Soviet sources,[23] KAL 007 entered the restricted airspace of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The buffer zone extended 200 kilometres (120 mi) from Kamchatka's coast and is known as a flight information region (FIR). The 100-kilometre (62 mi) radius of the buffer zone nearest to Soviet territory had the additional designation of prohibited airspace. When KAL 007 was about 130 kilometres (81 mi) from the Kamchatka coast, four MiG-23 fighters were scrambled to intercept the Boeing 747.[8]
Significant command and control problems were experienced trying to vector the fast military jets onto the Boeing before they ran out of fuel. In addition, pursuit was made more difficult, according to Soviet Air Force Captain Aleksandr Zuyev, who defected to the West in 1989, because Arctic gales had knocked out Soviet radar ten days before.[32] The unidentified jetliner therefore crossed over the Kamchatka Peninsula back into international airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk without being intercepted.
The Commander of the Soviet Far East District Air Defense Forces, General Valery Kamensky,[33] was adamant that KAL 007 was to be destroyed even over neutral waters but only after positive identification showed it not to be a passenger plane. His subordinate, General Anatoly Kornukov, commander of Sokol Air Base and later to become commander of the Russian Air Force, insisted that there was no need to make positive identification as "the intruder" had already flown over the Kamchatka Peninsula.