Was Korean Airlines Flight 85 a Simulated Hijack in a 9/11 Training Exercise?

Several hours after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington occurred, a passenger aircraft heading to the U.S. from Seoul, South Korea, was mistakenly considered hijacked. In a little-reported series of events, the pilots of Korean Airlines Flight 85 gave numerous indications that their plane had been taken over by hijackers, even though it had not. KAL 85, a Boeing 747 that had been due to land in Anchorage, Alaska, for a refueling stop, was consequently diverted to an airport in Canada.

The military launched fighter jets to tail it and, with authorization from the Canadian prime minister, threatened to shoot the plane down if it refused to change course. Only after KAL 85 landed were officials able to confirm that no hijacking had taken place.

While a person might suggest this crisis was just the result of confusion due to the unprecedented events earlier that day, the number of indications the pilots gave that their plane was hijacked, and their repeated failure to confirm that this was not the case, raises another possibility: Could KAL 85 have been playing the part of a hijacked aircraft in a military training exercise?

This explanation would make sense of the pilots’ otherwise inexplicable actions. And there is additional evidence supporting this possibility: On September 11, NORAD–the military organization responsible for defending North American airspace–was in the second week of a major exercise. Five days earlier, that exercise included two scenarios with remarkable similarities to the apparent crisis involving KAL 85. In one scenario, members of a fictitious terrorist group hijacked a Korean Airlines 747 bound from Seoul to Anchorage; in the other, a 747 bound from Japan to Anchorage was hijacked, and changed course for Canada.
[link to theintelhub.com]