Now in Ask the Pilot: Remembering TWA 847
THIRTY YEARS AGO this week, TWA flight 847 was hijacked on a flight from Athens to Rome.
The plane was commandeered by militiamen from Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, armed with grenades and pistols. The purloined 727 then embarked on an incredible, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again.
Save for the September 11th attacks, the story of flight 847 stands as the single-most dramatic and unforgettable airliner hijacking in history. Yet most of us have forgotten about it. Younger people have likely never heard of it. Which is why I'm bringing up the anniversary: for the sake of perspective. Our politics and culture have become preoccupied with the specter of terrorism, an obsession that is felt acutely by those of us on the front lines of commercial air travel. Yet ironically, whether because or in spite of this fixation, attacks against civil aviation targets don't happen nearly as often as they used to. Few people know or recall how deadly previous decades were. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were rife with hijackings, bombings, airport shootings and so on.
Maybe this is healthy, to some extent? We can view it, perhaps, as an expression of resilience, a cultural acknowledgment that hey, we all face certain risks, and even the most calamitous front-page tragedies eventually give way to the march of time as people go on living their lives. At the other extreme, we can see it as ignorant, or even dangerous: valuable historical context obliterated by an age of hysterical news coverage and a general hypersensitivity to pretty much everything.
I don't know which of those, if either, is a correct diagnosis, but try to envision, for a moment, the flight 847 saga happening today. Imagine, if you possibly can, how berserk the media would be. Mind you, flight 847 was the third hijacking to occur in the region
that week in 1985! Earlier, a Jordanian 707 and a Middle East Airlines 707 had been taken. Those first two had been dramatic enough, but this was a hijacking that the boldest Hollywood script couldn't have improved upon: A U.S. Navy diver named Robert Stethem would be murdered and his body tossed onto the tarmac. Other passengers and crew were beaten multiple times. Passengers were removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut, including a group of Jewish passengers eventually freed by U.S. Delta Force soldiers. At the airport in Algiers, one of the flight attendants charged 6000 gallons of jet fuel to her personal credit card after Algerian officials refused to provide fuel without payment. On its third landing in Beirut, the jet nearly ran out of fuel and crashed. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an icon of the siege.
Remarkably, Robert Stethem would be the only fatality. The remaining crew and passengers were eventually let go. The Israeli government later released 700 Shiite prisoners. Though this had been among the hijackers demands, Israel denied any connection.
The full article also includes a look-back at what I call "The Golden Age of Air Crimes." You can read it here...
http://www.askthepilot.com/twa-847/