Pan Am Flight 73: The 1986 Karachi Hijacking P1

The latest report is that at least dozens of people were left wounded and about 15 persons dead in a

“weathering hail of automatic weapons fired.”

Flying is something most of us will do several times in our lives. Sometimes it's a short domestic hop, other times along all journey across the world. On any given day roughly 100,000 commercial flights will take off in land globally. And yet, for many people, stepping onto an aircraft is still an anxious experience. There's a fear of flying itself, being sealed inside a metal tube, travelling at hundreds of kilometers an hour, 35,000 feet above the ground.

The knowledge that if something were to go wrong up there, you're completely reliant on the people in the cockpit. Hello. Mr. Fexton, how are you sir? I'm very well. Thank you very much. I very much appreciate your time, sir. Thank you very much indeed.

“Before every flight we're carefully walk through the safety procedures, seat belts, oxygen masks,”

suburgency exits, what to do if the cabin fills with smoke, what to do if there's water landing.

But there's one scenario that's never discussed.

No safety card explains what to do if someone were to take control of the plane. So she went upstairs by the time she got the top of the stairs in front of the hijacker. She realized that she needed to give the pilot time to escape. For most of us, hijackings feel like something from another era, something associated with the headlines the 1970s. Or something that only truly entered public consciousness after September 11, 2001.

It's not something person just actively prepare for. And it's certainly not something anyone expects to experience firsthand. I was telling myself, stake arm, make yourself inconspicuous. In 1986, even less so, air travel was different then. Security was looser, doors to the cockpit weren't reinforced.

The idea that an ordinary commercial flight could suddenly turn into a hostage situation wasn't part of the average passengers' mental checklist. And yet, for Michael Thekston, and the rest of the passengers and crew aboard Laptons are Flight 73, that an imaginable scenario became a reality. Before the plane's wheels had even left the runway.

Pakistan, a commando stormed a hijack, Panam jumbled jet this afternoon. It was the jet carrying about 400 people. When we say this afternoon, we meet this afternoon, New York Times. Panam Flight 73 was a Pan American world airlines flight from Bombay, India to New York City, which scheduled stops in Karachi, Pakistan, and Frankfurt, West Germany.

On September 5, 1986, the Boeing 747 was hijacked while on the ground of Karachi. By four armed Palestinian militants of the Arvune-Dhal organisation. And they wanted one thing. For that flight to take off, taking them to Cyprus and then onto Israel to pick up Palestinian prisoners.

But luckily, for Michael and the rest of the 359 passengers, the plane would never make it off that tarmac.

However, by the time the odd deal was over, sadly more than 20 passengers would be killed. And Michael Theksten was very close to being the 21st. And I first had laughing. I mean, I was probably close to fairly uncontrollable hysterics. I said, "I haven't got a gun. You've got all the guns around here."

And he said, "Neal here."

“So how does an accountant from southwest London end up in Pakistan on a plane with a gun to his head?”

Well to understand that, we first must start at the very beginning. And the extraordinary story of Michael's brother. My name is Jack Lawrence. Welcome to what I survived. I don't know who's the winner tonight, but yeah. Chapter one, people want to be what their heroes are.

I grew up in southwest London. I had, I was very lucky to grow up in the Methodist Minister's training college,

So we had a lot of space. I had a big old building that I could run around and explore. And one of the big London parks, just as almost my background, it was a great place to grow up. Growing up, we were exploring and talk about your brother,

because obviously he's basically the reason why you ended up where you were.

But Peter was your older brother.

“Can you tell me about growing up with Peter as an older brother?”

Peter was what he was about six years older than me. And I can't remember much about our early years together. But he went to boarding school. He was quite difficult as a small child. My parents didn't really know what to do with him.

They ended up sending him away to boarding school when he was about eight or nine. And he's funny, when we were clearing out my mother's house, when she got into a care home, and we found lots of old letters, including letters that he wrote from boarding school

when he just gone there, you know, when he was sort of eight or nine. And a letter to me, you know, described me as his best pal. And I don't remember that. No, he obviously wrote letters to me.

“The thing was that I, I sort of, I worshipped him.”

Growing up, Michael had three siblings. Of course, there was Peter, his older brother, and two sisters, one older and one younger. Michael and his sisters wouldn't be sent to boarding school like their older brother.

By the time they came along, Michael's parents had decided that boarding school probably wasn't the right decision.

Michael believes his parents always regretted sending Peter.

However, it would be while at boarding school that his brother discovered what would become his life's passion. At boarding school, he started climbing. It became his passion. He was in the boys' gaps, and they did.

They went camping, and then they did small rock climbing. And gradually it became the thing that he really wanted to do. So he went, when he stopped coming on family holidays, he would be off camping in Scotland, or camping in the Alps in France, Switzerland,

and climbing bigger and bigger mountains. That was his passion.

“Very adventurous guy, and I think you've said in the past”

that you weren't as much of as the adventurous type as your brother was. No, I wanted to be. Obviously, people wanted to be what they're here as are. So I used to, I tried rock climbing. When I was at university, I have a couple of good friends.

We went rock climbing, and we went rock climbing with my brother. And I realised fairly quickly that I just don't have the head for the head for heights. I couldn't do it. Peter would go on to become a doctor. A profession that would allow him to continue to follow his passion of climbing.

Because as a junior doctor, you would do a six month rotation. Jobs, so Peter would work for six months, and then take six months off to go climbing. Most doctors move on from that quite quickly and start taking longer jobs. But he didn't, he just carried on doing these six month junior doctor jobs.

When he went on his last expedition, he was just coming to the point where he thought, "I have to grab a bit now. I have to do it. I have to get serious about this." Michael, you could say it was almost the polar opposite to his brother when it came to the adventurous nature. He was more comfortable in civilization, as opposed to climbing mountains and camping on the side of cliffs.

Michael was always good at numbers, and eventually that would lead him into the profession of an accountant.

And he was very successful at it. And I went off and studied as a junior accountant and did all my exams. And during that time there were a campus I get very bad rap that they're all very dull and so on. I guess I thought that Peter was out there doing interesting things. And I could enjoy his travelers' tales and his slideshows.

And that was fine. I didn't mind that I was just going to the office and doing my exam. That was, I guess that was three years from 1980 to 1983, while I was studying and doing exams. During this period Michael says that a colleague had brought in a climbing magazine and there on the front cover was his big brother. And he looked so ripped and all of the girls, you know, looking at this picture and he was looking at me and thinking, "This is your brother."

And at that time, while I was studying my final exams, he was off in Northern Pakistan on an expedition that was supposed to climb K2.

Chapter 2, The Easy One.

K2 isn't just another mountain.

“It rises out of the ranges on the border of Pakistan and China.”

A jagged pyramid of rock and ice that feels almost hostile in its shape. Sharp rigid lines, steep faces, no gentle slopes, certainly no easy way up. At over 8,600 meters, it's the second highest mountain on earth. But many climbers will tell you it's the most dangerous. steeper than Everest, less predictable, less forgiving. Just getting to K2 is an expedition in itself.

There are no roads leading to base camp, no helicopters dropping you, neatly at the foot of the mountain. You trek for days through classiers and narrow valleys surrounded by walls of rock that make you feel small, long before the climbing even begins.

At base camp, the air already feels thin, every movement takes more effort, your breath is shallow, your body never quite settles.

Even standing still, your heart works harder than it should. The landscape is brutal, but beautiful at the same time. Endless ice, grey rock, snow that never truly melts, the wind cuts straight through your clothing.

“And when it dies down, the silence feels almost unsettling. There's no life here, no trees and a birds, just a mountain watching.”

As climbers move higher, the conditions only worsen. Temperatures plunge well below freezing, oxygen levels drop to a point where simple tasks like tie a knot or zipping up the jacket become exhausting. Your thoughts slow and mistakes become easier to make. And on a mountain like K2, mistakes are really survivable. This isn't a place that allows hesitation or weakness or bad luck.

It's known among climbers as the savage mountain. A reputation earned through decades of avalanches, Southern storms, and roots that offer almost no margin for error. It's a dangerous place to be. Many have died. And this was the mountain that Michael's brother Peter was planning to conquer. However, before K2, they were tackle another mountain.

“Alice extreme one, a mountain designed for a climatisation.”

So he was on an expedition with, which was led by our house and Doug Scott, who are both famous British climbers. And they had the collected together a group of other climbers. And Pete made great friends with a man called Great Child. We've not met before the expedition. And they climbed together.

They climbed with Doug Scott, a mountain called Lobsang Spire, which is not that high. But it is a very difficult technical rock climb. But then they moved on to base of K2, got K2 standing on one side. And then it's other mountain broad peak, which is one of the 8,000 meter peaks. There are 14 peaks that are over 8,000 meters.

And it's regarded as the easy one. You know, I mean, you get over 8,000 meters you are dying. But broad peak is sort of considered just a walk. And so they were going to practice on that and get used to what it was like being at that altitude. Without the technical difficulty because K2 is considered probably the hardest of all the 8,000 meter peaks.

They're harder than Everest to get up. And so they were climbing this mountain in pairs. Pete climbed with Greg. And they would go up to a top camp, which is something like 22,000 feet. And then the idea was that they would climb to the top, come back down to that camp, come down.

And once they'd all done that, they would go and climb K2. Pete and Greg spend the night at the top camp. And in the early hours of the morning, they their way to the top ridge. But around 8,000 meters were you traverse along the ridge for around 30 minutes before you then descend back down. However, while on that ridge, they hit a problem.

Greg started to be ill.

He was complaining that his headache, I mean, you're always out of headache at that altitude.

But his headache was getting worse. He was wondering whether he was getting cerebral edema, which is leaking a fluid into the brain acute mountain sickness.

And Pete, of course, being the doctor, he was trying to assess how ill Greg was.

Greg said, "Well, look, I'll just sit here. You walk to the top, come back again." And Pete said, "No, no, we've got to go down. You know, you could be really ill here."

“And the only way to treat the acute mountain sickness is to go down.”

So they turned around and started down. And as they went down, Greg got better. And Pete got worse. Greg has written an account of it, which I have read probably twice in my life. And it makes me cry.

In fact, it makes me almost cry, even thinking about it.

They ended up in the dark with Greg lifting and lowering Pete roped length by roped length. I mean, it's just a completely epic descent. They got back to the top camp at two o'clock in the morning. They found another famous British climate on Will and was waiting there with a high altitude porter.

“Greg child, who's an Australian born American, who would go on to write a book called "Mixed Emotions,"”

mountaineering writings of Greg child. Where he documents many of his climbing expeditions and the loss of friends, including the death of Michael's brother Peter. At this point in time, however, he was utterly exhausted from bringing his friend single-handedly down the mountain, alive, but extremely unwell. Peter is placed into a sleeping bag in a tent. Come morning, he wakes up and asks for a drink.

However, tragically, by the time they return, Peter has died. And he died of pulmonary deema, which is the leaking fluid into the lungs, a different version of acute mountain sickness. And they had to bury him there. They had to put him in a crevasse in his sleeping bag, because they obviously couldn't get him down. It was hard not getting him down when he was still alive, but they couldn't bring his body down when he was dead.

And that was the last day, or just about the last day of June 1983. But I got to say, "Well, the strangest things about that, I was still on my exam course. I was new none of this. It took two weeks for that news to get out. And the leaders of the excellent addition sent Greg and another person down the mountain as quickly as possible,

because they wanted it possible to get the truth out before rumors started to filter out that a British climber had died. And so they tracked out as fast as possible, ended up making a phone call to tuck Scott's wife, who found my parents. And that was two weeks later. And I had, in that time, sat my final exam, which I would not have been able to do. I don't know what was going on in fact stuff.

It was an utterly miserable time. I mean, we all came together, we looked after each other. There's a thing about remembering how much you love the rest of your family. You lost somebody, but it was miserable.

“How long had it been since you'd seen your brother?”

When was the last year you'd seen him before he went away on this trip? I think I was there when we took him to the airport. So I guess we took him to the airport at the beginning of May or the very end of April to catch the plane to Pakistan. How did your parents feel about him doing these sort of expeditions in the mountain climbing and all the rest of it? It's one of those things that as a young man without children of my own.

I never really understood what my parents must have felt.

And then later you think, oh, you know, you worry about your children when they go to the shops? Yeah, absolutely. My parents worried about him, of course they did. And he was doing, you know, he had been doing dangerous things for years. And they sort of got used to it and accepted that that was what he did.

You know, it was the thing that made him who he was and they couldn't sort of ask him not to do it. But it was obviously shattering for them. And you know, it was shattering for all of us. My older sister who was closer and aged him, if he was just sort of two and a half years, the younger him, so the two of them had been a pair for quite a while before I turned up. She told me not long ago.

You know, she would tell herself that he's still out there and packed those to climbing the mountain.

“Chapter four, would you like to be the base camp manager?”

After his brother's passing, Michael and his family continued on as best they could with life. Michael would finish his studies doing extremely well with a glittering career ahead. However, by that stage, it was a career he no longer wanted. You know, I spent a year, I guess, working in the training department of the firm that I was in, because I was good at exams, so the idea was I would help the next lot pass their exams.

And then I was supposed to go on and be the rising star of the firm. And during that year, I just realised that what happened next in a council firm just did not appeal to me at all. And I thought, "I want to do something more interesting with my life." So what happened to your brother, his soul? I mean, I might have thought that anyway, because it became less acceptable to just follow this path that was laid out for me.

Because people wasn't there anymore. And I mean, you know, the sad thing, obviously it wasn't going to become a mountaineer. That was impossible, because I don't have the head of heights. What I decided to do, rather sad thing, was become a best selling novelist. I read a book by Jeffrey Archer, I thought, "Oh, that looks pretty easy."

And I wrote a book and a friend of mine read it.

“And he said, "Well, I don't think you should leave your day job."”

I then went into teaching a council's, because that was a job. A bit like Pete's jobs, you could teach a course for a council's. And then you could take a couple of months off. Yeah, if you wanted to, and do something else. And I decided that I would try and do some adventurous things. So I went to China as a backpacker in the summer of 1985.

I don't really have the appetite for being a backpacker, either. It was pretty hard, but at least I'd sort of done something. I've gone somewhere interesting and come back with some travelers' tales. And that could have been what I would do after that. That summer, some of the students from the medical school were peaked and trained as a doctor,

as well as where he'd been a leading light of the mountaineering climbing club that was also run from Mary's hospital, got in touch with the family. To ask, if they would be happy for them to hold what they were calling, the Thickston Memorial Expedition. And so they had an expedition in his memory, which went to Kenya.

And they climbed Mount Kenya. My friends who I'd gone climbing with peaked, they happened to be also in Kenya. That summer, and I got a postcard from them saying, have met the peaked Thickston Memorial Expedition. Peaked will be turning in his grave. That these guys were perhaps not quite as competent climbers as peaked a bit.

But at the beginning of 1986, they said that we had a really good trip to Kenya. And we are going to go to Lopsang Spa. This last mountain that peaked lined. And we're going to, you know, this is the area where peaked died. Woodmike liked to come and be the base camp manager.

So I was supposed to be the base camp manager. Obviously I had to go. You know, there's no way I was not going to take that opportunity.

I would never get another opportunity to go to the place.

They weren't planning to go to the base camp. But it's only a couple of days further on from where we were going to be based. And so we reckon I could probably walk up there with some companions.

“And so that's what we did in July of 1986.”

The thing that I find amazing now looking back. I suddenly thought my parents took me to the airport. You know, exactly the same as they had taken peaked to the airport. And they never said a word. And I, in my youthful innocence, never occurred to me what they might be thinking.

You know, but obviously they were thinking he's not coming back.

But he has to go, you know, they've never tried to talk me out of it.

That I still think I was being a most extraordinary thing. So July of 1986, I was opening my eyes for the very first time in this world, Mike.

That's exactly my birthday, July of 1986.

You were jumping on a plane and heading off to Pakistan.

“What was the sort of emotions for that? Was it excitement?”

Did you have any nerves about it? Yeah, it was a very emotional thing because it's like a pilgrimage. In every sense, in that you're going to a place that's very meaningful. And it's really hard to get there. And I think these days you can drive in quite a bit further.

But in those days, it was six days of hard walking. I mean, really hard walking. I was not as fetters all of the climbers. I tried to do some preparation, but it was a total shock.

I mean, we would get up in the morning sort of three or four o'clock in the dark.

There was no water that you could drink beyond what you were carrying. I mean, it was just brutal. And then you spend a lot of time walking by this river. The Braldo river, which comes down out of the Baltoro glacier. It's a huge raging torrent of melt water.

And you can hear it rolling boulders in a place like sort of grinding of teeth. And I knew that in 1978, Peter had been going on a different expedition up that river. And one of his fellow climbers had been carried into the river by a landslip. Pete was the only person within. And Peter tried to pull him out of the river.

And the guy died in his arms. And Pete then had to decide what to do. And go and fire the others and say, "Pat, you're died in the river." And so walking beside the Braldo was really scary and emotional. And then you come round a corner and you can see in the very far distance,

the top of Braldo Peak, miles and miles and miles away. And you walk towards it slowly over days. For a couple of weeks, Michael is at the Erdica's base camp. Where all of a sudden the stark realization of just how dangerous the area was comes to the forefront. A news arrives at camp of more tragedy.

I was there. News came down from K2 Basecamp. That our route, who was Pete's friend, who was the patron of our expedition, who'd been on the '98 through expedition, our route had died up the mountain. After the whole K2. And so I knew another friend of Pete's film-maker called Jim Kuren.

I knew he was up at K2 Basecamp. I walked up with a couple of friends to see if we could find Jim Kuren. Because he would be on his own. And that was extraordinary. We were just sort of walking in the middle of this shattered wasteland.

And then here, this familiar face comes over the skyline and there's Jim Kuren. And we walked back with him and listened to him talking about the loss of our routes. Eventually, Michael and some other members of his group would make the walk up to the broad peak base camp to his brother's final resting place. So he's able to say goodbye.

And while there he bumps into a group of Australian soldiers. They were doing some very long-term acclimatisation because they were planning an expedition to Everest

“for the bicentennial of Australia, which was going to happen in 1988, I believe.”

And so they were giving us dinner because we were just sort of visiting Pomegranus. And their doctor was talking to me. And he said, "Well, I've been monitoring all the people who've been going up broad peak and it's incredible. They come back down.

I asked them how did it go?" And they say, "Oh, well, I was fine. There's absolutely no problem at all because they're all Australian soldiers. They're not going to meet to any weakness." Yeah, of course.

And then I say, "Who are you climbing with?" And they can't remember. How long did it take you to get from here to there? And they can't remember. And he's saying, "I'm really conscious of what happened to Dr. Peter Nexton on broad peak three years ago."

And I said, "He's my brother."

And it was amazing to have him remembered by someone else at the foot of the mountain.

It was appropriate. And it was a fantastic thing.

“But it remains, I think, the hardest thing I have ever done.”

Walking to broad peak base camp and back. Michael Thechston had done what he set out to do. And to say he was ready to go home was an understatement. And in fact, he would be handed the perfect excuse to say goodbye to the expedition early and head home as soon as possible.

That was the day that our flight was getting home.

“Michael manages to get himself the last ticket in town to fly back towards home.”

Of course, little did he know at the time that that flight home will be life-changing.

And I said to him, "I said, "Please don't hurt me. My brother died in the mountains.

“My parents have no one else. Please don't hurt me."”

Next time, on what I survived.

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