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How to Stop a Hijacking
Need an effective way to thwart terrorists? Here’s the true story of El Al flight 219, whose pilot battled hijackers by pushing his Boeing 707 to its death-defying limits.
Stuff, April 2002
By John Parrish
Twenty minutes out of Amsterdam, Captain Uri Bar-Lev steadily guided El Al flight 219, a Boeing 707 bound for New York, toward a cruising altitude of 31,000 feet over the North Sea. It was the early morning hours of September 6, 1970. It hadn’t been a great morning for Bar-Lev. An hour earlier, at the airport, a pair of Senegalese diplomats had drawn the attention of a rookie security officer. They had bought their first—class tickets at the last minute—something unusual enough to interest the officer. Examining their passports, he discovered that the documents were nearly consecutively numbered. He knew that the odds against this were about the same as his chances of winning the lottery. Adding to the officer’s unease about this flight was a young blond couple traveling economy class on Nicaraguan passports-Central America isn’t exactly known for its blondes. The officer took his concerns to Bar-Lev. What happened after that shows that common sense and a zero-b.s. attitude can do more to stop hijackings than all the crotch-sniffing dogs and all the wand-waving dropouts in the world.
The passport numbers bothered Bar-Lev, too. At 39, he’d had years of experience sizing up threats. In 1948, at the age of 17, he had joined the Israeli Army to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. He later served as a fighter pilot with the Israeli Air Force and had flown numerous combat missions in conflicts with Israel’s Arab neighbors—something he still did as a reservist. He faced the enemy in his civilian life, too. Only a year before, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had hijacked a TWA plane, using hostages as bargaining chips and attempting to blow it up—just another episode in what Bar-Lev saw as an ongoing war. He took one look at the passports and, without any fear of being accused of impolite behavior, unceremoniously bumped the two Senegalese off his flight. They boarded a Pan Am jet scheduled for an earlier departure. Bar-Lev also had the Nicaraguans searched. They were clean, so he allowed them to board.
As he prepared for takeoff, Bar-Lev saw the Pan Am jet taxiing ahead of him come to a stop. The Senegalese were taken down a ramp, and Bar-Lev watched as the captain himself patted them down. When the pilot asked to see their briefcases, they refused; because they held diplomatic passports, no one could search their attaché cases. The pilot led the two men back onboard. After the Pan Am jet took off, the El Al flight followed.
GUNFIRE in first class As the plane climbed, flight attendant Michelle Eder walked toward the curtained-off first-class section. When she pulled back the screen, she thought she’d wandered onto a movie set: The blond Nicaraguans were out of their seats-the woman clutching two grenades, the man wielding a pistol. Eder, who’d been an army officer during Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, recognized the grenades as a type called Dutch Eggs. But before she could act, the male hijacker struck her across the head with his gun. She collapsed but remained conscious. The hijackers advanced toward the cockpit door.
Eder hadn’t seen the sky marshal who was supposed to sit in first class, so she feared that the hijackers had shot him. Though stunned from the pistol’s blow, she scrambled back into economy to alert the other marshal, who sat at the rear of the aircraft.
“They’re hijacking the plane!” she told him. Thinking she was joking, he laughed, but his laughter quickly faded when he saw her distress. He drew his gun and carefully advanced up the aisle. Eder rushed into the kitchen to activate the hijack alarm, which would sound and flash in the cockpit. Meanwhile, another flight attendant, Shlomo Vider, had unwittingly walked into first class from the other aisle, accompanied by a second female attendant, and they were taken hostage. Vider had served in the Israeli forces, where he was regarded as a tough combat vet. He sized up the attackers, saw an opportunity and lunged at the male hijacker. As they struggled, two shots rang out. Vider slumped to the floor, gravely wounded. The hijacker grabbed the female flight attendant and put his gun against her head.
THE PILOT’s daring plan The first-class sky marshal, the one Eder feared had been shot, was actually in the cockpit, talking with Bar-Lev and his crew. Everyone on the flight deck was unaware of the drama on the other side of the steel-reinforced door. Even the noise of the gunshots had been drowned out by the climbing jet’s engines. Suddenly the hijack alarm went off-Eder had activated it from the rear of the aircraft. “It’s just a false alarm,” said one of the crew, aware (like everyone else) that the system was prone to faults. Because of this, a confirmation alarm had been built in. Everyone froze when that too went off. Someone hammered on the cockpit door. Bar-Lev’s flight engineer looked through the door’s peephole and reported what he saw: a woman holding two grenades and a male accomplice with a gun to the head of a terrified flight attendant. The woman shouted for them to open up or she would kill the stewardess.
“Captain, we should do what they say,” one of the flight crew urged. Bar-Lev knew he had a few seconds, at most, to make a decision he’d have to live with for the rest of his life. The lives of 175 passengers and eight crew members depended on that decision. He thought about the presumptuousness of playing God with all those lives. As the crew member started quoting international aviation law, stating it was his duty to put the welfare of the passengers first, Bar-Lev racked his brain for a way to beat the hijackers. What he came up with was inspired and daring. He decided to throw the aircraft into a steep dive.
Such a dive would knock the hijackers off their feet and put them into a free fall inside the cabin. Effectively, they’d be weightless. NASA had used the technique for training astronauts. But this was a commercial jet full of passengers.
THE PLANE PLUNGES
Bar-Lev quickly thought his plan through. He reasoned that, since the aircraft was still climbing and he hadn’t switched off the seat-belt sign, the passengers would still be strapped in. But the grenades were a problem. If they exploded, they could severely cripple the aircraft. Even if the plane could still be flown after that, there’d be dangerous decompression. The potential for damage meant Bar-Lev had to lose altitude rapidly.
But doing this would push the aircraft to the extremes of its structural limits. If anyone knew those limits, it was Bar-Lev. During 707 training at Boeing’s headquarters in Seattle, the instructor had boasted that the aircraft was so good it could do aerobatics. Bar-Lev took him at his word and flew a loop. His bosses were not impressed at the time, but the experience now gave Bar-Lev the confidence to test the limits of the aircraft.
He yelled, “Hold fast!”-and then pushed the stick forward and put the aircraft into a terrifying dive. The aircraft hurtled downward at nearly the speed of sound. The two terrorists, along with everything else that wasn’t belted or bolted down, flew into the air. At the back of the aircraft, Eder clung to two other flight attendants, believing the aircraft was plunging to the ground and that she was about to die.
Bar-Lev dropped the jet 26,000 feet in three minutes, then, putting all his faith in the plane’s ability to handle excessive stress, suddenly pulled back on the stick to level her off, slamming the terrorists back.
Simultaneously, the sky marshal in the cockpit burst through the door. The hijacker fired three shots-at the wounded Vider. The sky marshal answered with a bullet that killed the hijacker. Meanwhile, another flight attendant and a passenger struggled with the female terrorist, who suddenly fainted, dropping the grenades she’d been clutching.
All eyes turned to the grenades as they rolled down the aisle toward the rear sky marshal. It takes four seconds for a grenade to explode: It was the longest four seconds anyone onboard had ever experienced. But nothing happened. They didn’t go off. Seeing that the male hijacker had been disabled, the rear sky marshal joined the other marshal in stripping the unconscious woman to see if she had any other weapons on her.
TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL A HIJACKER?
Bar-Lev emerged from the cockpit as the marshals found another grenade-this one stuffed in the woman’s bra. In her panties, they found a detailed plan of the hijacking, written in Arabic. She’d obviously hidden the grenades and pistol in her underwear to evade the search. One marshal tugged at her blond hair, and off came a wig. There was a collective intake of breath. Bar-Lev and the marshals recognized her. She was Leila Khaled, one of the world’s most notorious terrorists, a Palestinian and a sworn enemy of Israel. She had been the leader of the TWA hijacking the year before. One of the sky marshals drew his gun, intending to kill her.
Unexpectedly, Bar-Lev stepped in. He’d spent his adult life fighting Khaled’s kind, but he liked to think that he had always fought honorably. His own code wouldn’t allow him to sanction the killing of an unconscious prisoner. It was an honorable decision, but one that later almost cost him his job.
Bar-Lev then turned his attention to Vider. He’d been shot five times, and the pilot was surprised to see that there was very little bleeding. He feared that the bleeding was mostly internal, and if that were the case, Vider needed urgent medical attention. The captain decided to land at Heathrow Airport in London, get Vider help, then fly back to Israel.
But that plan posed a big problem: the dead hijacker. During a previous hijacking in Switzerland, a sky marshal had fatally shot a terrorist on the runway. The moronic Swiss, in a politically correct frenzy, jailed the marshal for a year. That was a fate Bar-Lev didn’t intend to share. As the 707 landed at Heathrow, Bar-Lev taxied very slowly along the runway. The marshals slipped out of a maintenance hatch in the bottom of the jet, then sneaked across to another El Al jet, which had been awaiting takeoff. The men boarded through the maintenance hatch and escaped.
Not surprisingly, Scotland Yard took in Bar-Lev’s crew for questioning. They wanted to know who’d killed the terrorist. Nobody would talk. While in custody, Bar-Lev learned that the Senegalese diplomats he had barred from his flight had hijacked the jet he’d seen pause on the runway. They flew it to Egypt, released the passengers and then blew it up. That same day, another two jets had been hijacked by Khaled’s group, followed by another one a few days later. They were all flown to Jordan and blown up. Some of the passengers were held hostage, pending Khaled’s release.
BAR-LEV TAKES THE HEAT
With the crew refusing to talk-including Vider, who was recovering in the hospital-Scotland Yard released them. Bar-Lev was feted internationally for being the first pilot ever to foil a hijacking. But when the British government caved in and released Khaled in return for hostages, the Israeli pilot was criticized in his homeland for halting her execution. Even though he realizes that Khaled would have killed innocent passengers and crew to achieve her aims, Bar-Lev still believes he chose the right course. “I’d seen combat, and you do what you have to do in war, but you do not kill a defenseless person in cold blood. You’d become like them, the terrorists.”
The storm of criticism led Bar-Lev to believe that his career—and reputation—were at stake, so he asked for a chance to explain himself to Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. He pleaded his case and won her support, retiring in 1995 after piloting 747s for 24 years.
After September 11, 2001, Bar-Lev relived the events of his own narrow escape 31 years before. When I contacted him, he told me he believed the only way to combat air terrorism is to foster a climate in which pilots feel they can fight back—killing terrorists, if necessary-without fear of being sued or fired or imprisoned for putting passengers at risk. To Bar-Lev, there just isn’t a choice.
Throwing the 707 into a life-threatening dive was “our only chance,” he recalls today. “If you give in to terror, you give the terrorists control. Then what happens? They blow up the aircraft? Kill the passengers and crew? We needed a fighting chance, and this was it.” Bar-Lev argues that it doesn’t matter how much security you have. “Fighting back is a state of mind,” he declares. “[If you say] ’I will not give in to terror,’ you will find a way to fight back somehow.”