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Kenneth Rowe (No Kum-Sok)
In September of 1953, less than two months after the Korean War ended with an armistice, a 21-year-
old North Korean fighter pilot defected to a South Korean airfield with a state-of-the-art Russian
fighter plane. A few short months later, that same pilot was living in a single in Brown Hall on The
Green at UD, working toward an engineering degree. By then, Flight Lt. No Kum-Sok was known
as Kenneth Rowe and was on the cusp of a successful career in aeronautical engineering, a career
that started at the University of Delaware.
Trapped in North Korea
In North Korea in the late 1940s, citizens didn’t have to choose a career; it was chosen for them. No
passed an entrance exam and was accepted by the North Korean Naval Academy. ”I was already an
anti-communist,” he said during a recent interview. “But there was no way to get out. It was very
harsh—intolerable.”
He soon found himself in flight school, eventually learning to fly what was at the time the most
advanced jet fighter aircraft in the world, the MiG-15.
In Manchuria, away from prying Western eyes, he and others were trained by Soviet advisers how
to fly the swept-wing fighter. “It was a crash program,” he says. “I worked very hard and was part
of the first group trained by the Russians.”
Soon after the North Korean forces invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950, No found himself in
combat training. By 1951, he was fighting in the skies above the battleground. “We were not really
ready to fly the plane,” he says.
By then, No’s mother had fled to South Korea, but he didn’t know that. All he knew was that he
was alone in one of the most dangerous professions in the world – combat fighter pilot.
“I flew more than 100 combat missions” during the course of the war, he says. Unlike in the Western
air forces, in which a pilot flew a set number of missions before rotating out of the combat zone,
North Korean pilots flew for the duration of the war.
“You flew until you died,” No says. “I almost lost my life many times.”
Flight to the West
A scant 56 days after the armistice halting the war was signed in 1953, No found himself scheduled
to fly out of a North Korean air base at Sunan, on the outskirts of the North Korean capital. He had
decided he was going to do what no pilot had yet done. He was going to defect to the West, and take
his top-secret MiG-15 with him.
“I figured I had a 20 percent chance of success,” he recalls. “I thought that was good enough.”
U.S. Air Force personnel were on the flight line when a jet appeared on the downwind leg of Kimpo
Air Force Base landing pattern, but they paid little attention to the plane, figuring it to be an Air
Force F-86 Sabre, a plane that shares some similarities with the MiG-15.
No landed and rolled to a stop before astounded servicemen realized what the plane was. He was
surrounded by American pilots, and the plane was whisked away into a hangar. In fact, it was
months before the world learned that the U.S. had just gained a priceless MiG.
No was given the $100,000 reward the U.S. government had offered for a MiG. He says that he didn’t
know about the reward while in North Korea. He just wanted to get free.
To No, the MiG was a way to get to the West. For the U.S., it was an invaluable example of a key
communist weapon, one primed to be studied and flight-tested.
In fact, while No was being introduced to the U.S. (where he chose the name Kenneth Rowe), test
pilots, including then-Maj. Chuck Yeager, were putting the plane through its paces. Yeager and
another pilot, Capt. H.E. “Tom” Collins, reported that the plane had some dangerous flight
characteristics and some design flaws.
For a time, Rowe assisted test pilots on Okinawa and told them about his experiences with the North
Korean and Soviet air forces. The American test pilots, he says, “were the best in the world.”
Becoming an American
The first few months of Rowe’s life in the U.S. were spent as a paid contractor to American
intelligence services. During this time, he frequently traveled by rail between Washington, D.C., and
New York. When it came time to choose his next step, he knew where he wanted to go.
“I had seen Newark [Delaware] from the train and knew it was a good engineering school,” he says.
“I still wanted to be an engineer.”
Even with all the experiences he had been through, Rowe found himself somewhat unprepared for
life on his own. “I didn’t even know how to cash a check,” he says.
But he soon learned. He enrolled in UD’s College of Engineering, moved into a single room on the
fourth floor of Brown Hall and, between classes, regularly visited Main Street as students do today.
His University education “was an important steppingstone in my life, a very important part of my
life,” he says.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, he earned another in electrical
engineering and became an aeronautical engineer.
Rowe was reunited with his mother, who came to the U.S. to live with him. One of his first jobs was
with the DuPont Co. Experimental Station near Wilmington.
After that came jobs as an aeronautical engineer with Boeing, Westinghouse, General Electric and a
number of other companies. Along the way he married and built a family. But, Rowe says, among all
his accomplishments, there is one he is particularly proud of.
UD history Prof. John A. Munroe convinced then-Sen. J. Allen Frear of Delaware to introduce a
special bill to declare Rowe a U.S. citizen. It was signed by President Eisenhower.
“And it was all because of John Munroe,” Rowe says of the well-known and respected Delaware
historian, who died in 2006. “He and I, we were very close.”
Life today in retirement
Kenneth Rowe is now retired and lives in Florida. When Rowe came to the University of Delaware 56
years ago, he had been trained to do one thing—fly.
Since then, he credits his undergraduate years with setting him on the course for a very successful
life. He returned to Newark once, for a reunion, and although he hasn’t been back since, he says he
often thinks about his student days.
In 2000, he retired from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and still lives near the campus in
Daytona Beach, Fla.
Another survivor from that era is a silver, swept-wing MiG-15. It sits, beautifully restored, in a
building at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near
Dayton, Ohio.
The plane looks as it did back when the man who would become Kenneth Rowe turned onto final
approach at Kimpo in 1953, becoming the “Yankee” he had been trained to shoot down.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kenneth Rowe recounted his own story in the book "A MiG-15 to Freedom",
written under his original name, No Kum-Sok, with co-author J. Roger Osterholm. Rowe has also
written a memoir, “The Last Day of the Korean War,” published in the Friends Journal of the Air Force
Museum Foundation.
Article by Ted Caddell, AS ’83 for the University of Delaware "Messenger" 2011
The MIG -15
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 (Russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-15) was a jet fighter developed
for the USSR by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. The MiG-15 was one of the first successful
swept-wing jet fighters, and it achieved fame in the skies over Korea, where early in the war, it
outclassed all straight-winged enemy fighters in daylight. The MiG-15 also served as the starting
point for development of the more advanced MiG-17 which was still an effective threat to supersonic
American fighters over North Vietnam in the 1960s. The MiG-15 is believed to have been the most
widely produced jet aircraft ever made, with over 12,000 built. Licensed foreign production perhaps
raised the total to over 18,000.[1] The MiG-15 is often mentioned along with the North American F-
86 Sabre in lists of the best fighter aircraft of the Korean War and in comparison with fighters of
other eras.
MIG Alley
"MIG Alley" is the name given by U.S. Air Force pilots to the northwestern portion of North Korea,
where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea. During the Korean War, it was the site of
numerous dogfights between U.S. fighter jets and those of the Communist forces, particularly the
Soviet Union. The North American F-86 Sabre and the Soviet-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 were
the aircraft used throughout most of the conflict, with the area's nickname derived from the latter.
Because it was the site of the first large-scale jet-vs-jet air battles, MIG Alley is considered the
birthplace of jet fighter combat.
MiG-15 delivered by a defecting North Korean pilot to the US Air Force.
The North Koreans began their war against South Korea on June 25, 1950 with a small, obsolescent
air force of propeller-driven Soviet aircraft of World War II vintage flown by under-trained and
inexperienced pilots. Once the United States committed its air power to the war, this force was
rapidly depleted.
For several months, U.S. F-80 Shooting Star and F-84 Thunderjet fighters, along with B-29
Superfortress bombers and Navy and Marine aircraft, roamed the skies over North Korea virtually at
will while the North Koreans and their Soviet and Communist Chinese backers argued behind the
scenes over the best course of counter-action. By October, the Soviet Union had agreed to provide air
regiments equipped with high performance MiG-15 fighters, along with the trained crews to fly
them. Simultaneously, the Kremlin agreed to supply the Chinese and North Koreans with their own
MiG-15s, as well as training for their pilots.
Secrecy
For many years, the participation of Soviet aircrews in the Korean War was widely suspected by the
United Nations forces, but consistently denied by the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War,
however, Soviet pilots who participated in the conflict have begun to reveal their role.
Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North
Korean uniforms or civilian clothes, to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were
given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic
characters. These subterfuges did not long survive the fury of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots
were soon routinely communicating in Russian.
Soviet MiG-15 regiments were based on Chinese fields in Manchuria, where, according to existing U.
S. rules of engagement, they could not be attacked by U.S. forces. Many Soviet regiments underwent
preliminary training at Soviet bases in the neighboring Soviet Maritime Military District. Soviet air
defense troops also began to arrive along the Yalu, setting up radar installations, ground control
centers, searchlights and large numbers of anti-aircraft guns to deter any attacks on the Chinese
airfields.
While U.S. pilots chafed at the restrictions imposed on attacking the MiG's Chinese airfields, it wasn't
known until many years later that the MiG pilots themselves operated under tight restrictions. To
preserve the fiction that Soviet pilots were not fighting in Korea, they were prohibited from flying
over non-Communist-controlled territory or within 30 to 50 miles of the Allied front lines. (One
Soviet pilot who was shot down in UN-controlled territory shot himself with his pistol rather than
be taken captive. Another pilot who bailed out into the Yellow Sea was strafed to prevent him from
being captured.) Nor could they pursue U.S. aircraft over the U.S.-controlled Yellow Sea.
In spite of the restrictions, many U.S. pilots took advantage of a "hot pursuit" exception to flying
over China to pursue MiGs across the Yalu River. Later, "hot pursuit" became active MiG hunting
over Manchuria, with U.S. pilots maintaining a "code of silence" about the patrols. Flight leaders
chose wingmen who would keep quiet, and many rolls of incriminating gun camera footage
"mysteriously" disappeared.
In September of 1953, less than two months after the Korean War ended with an armistice, a 21-year-
old North Korean fighter pilot defected to a South Korean airfield with a state-of-the-art Russian
fighter plane. A few short months later, that same pilot was living in a single in Brown Hall on The
Green at UD, working toward an engineering degree. By then, Flight Lt. No Kum-Sok was known
as Kenneth Rowe and was on the cusp of a successful career in aeronautical engineering, a career
that started at the University of Delaware.
Trapped in North Korea
In North Korea in the late 1940s, citizens didn’t have to choose a career; it was chosen for them. No
passed an entrance exam and was accepted by the North Korean Naval Academy. ”I was already an
anti-communist,” he said during a recent interview. “But there was no way to get out. It was very
harsh—intolerable.”
He soon found himself in flight school, eventually learning to fly what was at the time the most
advanced jet fighter aircraft in the world, the MiG-15.
In Manchuria, away from prying Western eyes, he and others were trained by Soviet advisers how
to fly the swept-wing fighter. “It was a crash program,” he says. “I worked very hard and was part
of the first group trained by the Russians.”
Soon after the North Korean forces invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950, No found himself in
combat training. By 1951, he was fighting in the skies above the battleground. “We were not really
ready to fly the plane,” he says.
By then, No’s mother had fled to South Korea, but he didn’t know that. All he knew was that he
was alone in one of the most dangerous professions in the world – combat fighter pilot.
“I flew more than 100 combat missions” during the course of the war, he says. Unlike in the Western
air forces, in which a pilot flew a set number of missions before rotating out of the combat zone,
North Korean pilots flew for the duration of the war.
“You flew until you died,” No says. “I almost lost my life many times.”
Flight to the West
A scant 56 days after the armistice halting the war was signed in 1953, No found himself scheduled
to fly out of a North Korean air base at Sunan, on the outskirts of the North Korean capital. He had
decided he was going to do what no pilot had yet done. He was going to defect to the West, and take
his top-secret MiG-15 with him.
“I figured I had a 20 percent chance of success,” he recalls. “I thought that was good enough.”
U.S. Air Force personnel were on the flight line when a jet appeared on the downwind leg of Kimpo
Air Force Base landing pattern, but they paid little attention to the plane, figuring it to be an Air
Force F-86 Sabre, a plane that shares some similarities with the MiG-15.
No landed and rolled to a stop before astounded servicemen realized what the plane was. He was
surrounded by American pilots, and the plane was whisked away into a hangar. In fact, it was
months before the world learned that the U.S. had just gained a priceless MiG.
No was given the $100,000 reward the U.S. government had offered for a MiG. He says that he didn’t
know about the reward while in North Korea. He just wanted to get free.
To No, the MiG was a way to get to the West. For the U.S., it was an invaluable example of a key
communist weapon, one primed to be studied and flight-tested.
In fact, while No was being introduced to the U.S. (where he chose the name Kenneth Rowe), test
pilots, including then-Maj. Chuck Yeager, were putting the plane through its paces. Yeager and
another pilot, Capt. H.E. “Tom” Collins, reported that the plane had some dangerous flight
characteristics and some design flaws.
For a time, Rowe assisted test pilots on Okinawa and told them about his experiences with the North
Korean and Soviet air forces. The American test pilots, he says, “were the best in the world.”
Becoming an American
The first few months of Rowe’s life in the U.S. were spent as a paid contractor to American
intelligence services. During this time, he frequently traveled by rail between Washington, D.C., and
New York. When it came time to choose his next step, he knew where he wanted to go.
“I had seen Newark [Delaware] from the train and knew it was a good engineering school,” he says.
“I still wanted to be an engineer.”
Even with all the experiences he had been through, Rowe found himself somewhat unprepared for
life on his own. “I didn’t even know how to cash a check,” he says.
But he soon learned. He enrolled in UD’s College of Engineering, moved into a single room on the
fourth floor of Brown Hall and, between classes, regularly visited Main Street as students do today.
His University education “was an important steppingstone in my life, a very important part of my
life,” he says.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, he earned another in electrical
engineering and became an aeronautical engineer.
Rowe was reunited with his mother, who came to the U.S. to live with him. One of his first jobs was
with the DuPont Co. Experimental Station near Wilmington.
After that came jobs as an aeronautical engineer with Boeing, Westinghouse, General Electric and a
number of other companies. Along the way he married and built a family. But, Rowe says, among all
his accomplishments, there is one he is particularly proud of.
UD history Prof. John A. Munroe convinced then-Sen. J. Allen Frear of Delaware to introduce a
special bill to declare Rowe a U.S. citizen. It was signed by President Eisenhower.
“And it was all because of John Munroe,” Rowe says of the well-known and respected Delaware
historian, who died in 2006. “He and I, we were very close.”
Life today in retirement
Kenneth Rowe is now retired and lives in Florida. When Rowe came to the University of Delaware 56
years ago, he had been trained to do one thing—fly.
Since then, he credits his undergraduate years with setting him on the course for a very successful
life. He returned to Newark once, for a reunion, and although he hasn’t been back since, he says he
often thinks about his student days.
In 2000, he retired from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and still lives near the campus in
Daytona Beach, Fla.
Another survivor from that era is a silver, swept-wing MiG-15. It sits, beautifully restored, in a
building at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near
Dayton, Ohio.
The plane looks as it did back when the man who would become Kenneth Rowe turned onto final
approach at Kimpo in 1953, becoming the “Yankee” he had been trained to shoot down.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kenneth Rowe recounted his own story in the book "A MiG-15 to Freedom",
written under his original name, No Kum-Sok, with co-author J. Roger Osterholm. Rowe has also
written a memoir, “The Last Day of the Korean War,” published in the Friends Journal of the Air Force
Museum Foundation.
Article by Ted Caddell, AS ’83 for the University of Delaware "Messenger" 2011
The MIG -15
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 (Russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-15) was a jet fighter developed
for the USSR by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. The MiG-15 was one of the first successful
swept-wing jet fighters, and it achieved fame in the skies over Korea, where early in the war, it
outclassed all straight-winged enemy fighters in daylight. The MiG-15 also served as the starting
point for development of the more advanced MiG-17 which was still an effective threat to supersonic
American fighters over North Vietnam in the 1960s. The MiG-15 is believed to have been the most
widely produced jet aircraft ever made, with over 12,000 built. Licensed foreign production perhaps
raised the total to over 18,000.[1] The MiG-15 is often mentioned along with the North American F-
86 Sabre in lists of the best fighter aircraft of the Korean War and in comparison with fighters of
other eras.
MIG Alley
"MIG Alley" is the name given by U.S. Air Force pilots to the northwestern portion of North Korea,
where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea. During the Korean War, it was the site of
numerous dogfights between U.S. fighter jets and those of the Communist forces, particularly the
Soviet Union. The North American F-86 Sabre and the Soviet-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 were
the aircraft used throughout most of the conflict, with the area's nickname derived from the latter.
Because it was the site of the first large-scale jet-vs-jet air battles, MIG Alley is considered the
birthplace of jet fighter combat.
MiG-15 delivered by a defecting North Korean pilot to the US Air Force.
The North Koreans began their war against South Korea on June 25, 1950 with a small, obsolescent
air force of propeller-driven Soviet aircraft of World War II vintage flown by under-trained and
inexperienced pilots. Once the United States committed its air power to the war, this force was
rapidly depleted.
For several months, U.S. F-80 Shooting Star and F-84 Thunderjet fighters, along with B-29
Superfortress bombers and Navy and Marine aircraft, roamed the skies over North Korea virtually at
will while the North Koreans and their Soviet and Communist Chinese backers argued behind the
scenes over the best course of counter-action. By October, the Soviet Union had agreed to provide air
regiments equipped with high performance MiG-15 fighters, along with the trained crews to fly
them. Simultaneously, the Kremlin agreed to supply the Chinese and North Koreans with their own
MiG-15s, as well as training for their pilots.
Secrecy
For many years, the participation of Soviet aircrews in the Korean War was widely suspected by the
United Nations forces, but consistently denied by the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War,
however, Soviet pilots who participated in the conflict have begun to reveal their role.
Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North
Korean uniforms or civilian clothes, to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were
given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic
characters. These subterfuges did not long survive the fury of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots
were soon routinely communicating in Russian.
Soviet MiG-15 regiments were based on Chinese fields in Manchuria, where, according to existing U.
S. rules of engagement, they could not be attacked by U.S. forces. Many Soviet regiments underwent
preliminary training at Soviet bases in the neighboring Soviet Maritime Military District. Soviet air
defense troops also began to arrive along the Yalu, setting up radar installations, ground control
centers, searchlights and large numbers of anti-aircraft guns to deter any attacks on the Chinese
airfields.
While U.S. pilots chafed at the restrictions imposed on attacking the MiG's Chinese airfields, it wasn't
known until many years later that the MiG pilots themselves operated under tight restrictions. To
preserve the fiction that Soviet pilots were not fighting in Korea, they were prohibited from flying
over non-Communist-controlled territory or within 30 to 50 miles of the Allied front lines. (One
Soviet pilot who was shot down in UN-controlled territory shot himself with his pistol rather than
be taken captive. Another pilot who bailed out into the Yellow Sea was strafed to prevent him from
being captured.) Nor could they pursue U.S. aircraft over the U.S.-controlled Yellow Sea.
In spite of the restrictions, many U.S. pilots took advantage of a "hot pursuit" exception to flying
over China to pursue MiGs across the Yalu River. Later, "hot pursuit" became active MiG hunting
over Manchuria, with U.S. pilots maintaining a "code of silence" about the patrols. Flight leaders
chose wingmen who would keep quiet, and many rolls of incriminating gun camera footage
"mysteriously" disappeared.
