On the morning of September 21, 1953, No flew his Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 from Sunan just outside Pyongyang to the Kimpo Air Base in South Korea. The time from take-off in North Korea to landing in South Korea was 17 minutes, with the MiG reaching 1000 km/h (620 mph). During the flight, he was not chased by North Korean aircraft (as he was too far away), nor was he interdicted by American air or ground forces; U.S. radar near Kimpo had been shut down temporarily that morning for routine maintenance. No landed the wrong way on the runway, almost hitting an F-86 Sabre jet landing at the same time from the opposite direction. Captain Dave William veered out of the way and exclaimed over the radio "It's a goddamn MiG!". Another American pilot, Captain Jim Sutton, who was circling the airport, said that if No had tried to land in the right direction, he would have been spotted and shot down. No taxied the MiG into a free parking spot between two Sabre jets, got out of the plane and began tearing up a picture of Kim Il-sung that was placed in the cockpits of North Korean aircraft, and then threw up his arms in surrender at approaching airbase security guards.

In 1996, he wrote and published a book, A MiG-15 to Freedom, about his defection and previous life in North Korea. Rowe retired in 2000 after working 17 years as an aeronautical engineering professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. A biography of No by Blaine Harden was published in 2015 as The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and The Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom. Harden had access to newly released intelligence, and to No.