R.I.P.

Kenneth Rowe, who piloted North Korean warplane to freedom, dies at 90.
Lt. No Kum-Sok was defecting after the War.
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 D. 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.

Mr. Rowe, who died Dec. 26 at age 90 at his home in Daytona Beach, Fla., said he didn’t know about the reward money at the time. He only sought to breath “free air for the first time in my life,” Mr. Rowe recounted in a memoir, “A MiG-15 to Freedom” (1996), written with J. Roger Osterholm.
 
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