Pan Am Flight 73: The 1986 Karachi Hijacking P2

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

“The moments in our lives that feel utterly mundane as we're living them.”

A different choice at breakfast, taking the stairs, instead of the lift, turning left instead of right, staying home instead of going out. Small moments that, for most of us, mean really nothing at the time. However, if you look back at your life now, maybe the part that you're married to, the job that you have, maybe an accident you found yourself in,

you can think back to those mundane decisions that maybe led you to where you are and think, "What if?" Some call them sliding doors moments, a split second when our life could have gone one way or another. And we chose or fate chose for us, the path that led us there.

“For Michael Thekston, you could possibly point out a number of these sliding doors moments.”

Moments that he could never have known would lead him to a life or death situation.

However, one of the first came just after he had finished his pilgrimage to say goodbye to his big brother, in the mountains of Pakistan. Exhausted, hungry, and desperate to get home to his family. He would receive the perfect excuse to leave the expedition team early. [Music] Chapter five, they were looking in the wrong place.

When I got back to the edge of civilization, which is not particularly civilised in northern Pakistan, town called Scardu, which really is the edge of nowhere, there was a bunch of letters. I thought I'd been forgotten. Our correspondence had not got up to base getting. There were 12 letters waiting for me. One of them said, "We're looking forward to being back at work," you know, teaching accountants, and I worked out that the day is when they said that I was

expected to be teaching, and that was the day that our flight was getting home. Oh dear. Now, which was sort of a week later, but we had a very cheap flight that that had a layover in Egypt. And I have to say, "I need very little excuse. I want to see my family, I want a soft bed, I'm done here." You can't really imagine again.

“And it's hard to remember how hard it was. I mean, we'd all been fantasizing about decently.”

We had, we were very cheap skate expedition. We, in deciding what provisions to take with us, and our quartermaster, I'd guess you'd call them, they said, "Well, what are the four does eat? Well, we'll have that." And by the time we realized that really wasn't enough, we were a long way from a shop, you know, and so we'd spend two months up the mandal, six weeks up the mandal, eating rice, style, and chapaties, and precious little else. And we were just desperate

for decently. And I had lost probably a fifth of my body weight, 35 pounds, maybe, something like that.

I looked like a complete rack, and I had never been ill. I was the only member of the expedition

who never got any sort of diarrhea and vomiting, most of them got something, well, everybody got something at some point. But I never did. And yet, I was emaciated. So once back in Skardoo, Michael and a couple of others got on a flight to Islamabad in northern Pakistan. And then we'd spend the night in an area called Rapinda, where Michael said about trying to get himself a flight home as soon as possible. And I spent the morning going round all of the

airline offices desperately seeing if I could get home for work, quicker than the rest of the

expedition. And there was one ticket, you know, basically, I know for a fact that I've been in British

Airways, I've been in Laftansa, I've been in Swiss Air. And in the Pan Am office, I was a woman who said, "Yes, I've got one ticket from Karachi tomorrow morning, they'll get you to Frankfurt, then you'll have to negotiate to fly to London, but you know, I thought Frankfurt's the right continent." So she sold me this ticket, which is a business class ticket. I mean, it was astonishing how much I spent on that. It was more money that we had spent on the whole of the expedition's food

for a flight home, packs up his kit for the first time in some weeks, he's on his own.

“But I was a very strange thing also, that I then said goodbye to the rest of the expedition,”

that day. And these are people that I've been living in the pockets up for the last two months, to suddenly be on my own and have to get myself from aid to be without somebody telling we where to go and, you know, a couple of quarters carrying my luggage, that was a very strange thing. And so a couple of them came with me in the taxi to Islamabad airport to get a connecting of an insert or flight down to Karachi. Then I got an airport bus to the airport

hotel, the person in the pan and office that booked me a room for the night. And then I was supposed to, you know, get myself down to the airport again for three o'clock in the morning.

Panic that he wouldn't receive his early morning wake-up call from the hotel reception,

he sits up all night fully clothed and bed waiting for the sunrise. And much like he feared, no call came. But he was awake and it was time to start his journey home. Little did he know at the time, but sleeping through an alarm would have been the best. Impossible outcome. I had these two big kickbacks that were with Expedition gear in that we were trying to get home,

managed to get rid of those. I got the Expeditions film, which in those days was not a little thing. It was a 15 kilo hand luggage back, you know, full of cassettes of tape. And that was precious to me. I was carrying that as hand luggage and tried to make it not look any heavier than it was supposed to be. And I had two cine cameras around my network. I borrowed these from Pete's friend Jim Carrot. And so I was making, making a film as well as being the

base camp manager. And, you know, everything else, I was wearing, I was wearing this red duvet jacket. But I, it was quite appropriate to murder gas, but it's pretty eccentric in Carrot's airport. And a pattern Panama hat that had seen better days in my mountaineering boots. Because it would just have too much luggage, you know, and what you can't put in the kit bags or put in your hand

“luggage, you have to wear. I went through the security. What they didn't do was they searched”

everything very subtly. It gave everything out of this 15 kilo, although there's nothing in there that shouldn't be there apart from probably about 10 kilos. But, you know, it was quite a struggle to get it all back in again. And I mean, these days, of course, I tend to pay more attention to the security in airports. But on that day, there was a rumor afterwards that they'd had a warning. And maybe that was why they were taking everything very seriously. But, unfortunately,

they were looking in the wrong place. But 1986, despite of the world, was anything but calm. Pakistan was still under the rule of Muhammad Ziyal Huck, a military dictator who'd taken power in a coup nearly a decade earlier. Political opposition had been suppressed, dissident silence, and the country governed under martial law for much of that time. But that year, something had begun to shift.

After years in exile, opposition leader Benizib Buto had been allowed back into the country. Newspapers were filled with speculation, resist the beginning of political liberalisation, or simply a calculated move by regime under pressure. The uncertainty was palpable. Northern Pakistan already volatile sat at the crossroads of regional conflict. The Soviet war in neighbouring Afghanistan was still raging. Refugees, fighters, weapons,

and ideologies flowed across borders. Intelligence agencies, militant groups, and foreign

interests all overlapped in ways that were really visible, but always felt.

There was a sense that things could tip at any minute. Military presence was normal, checkpoint to a common. Armed soldiers were part of the landscape. For locals, it was life under constant tension. But visitors, it was quite unsettling. You didn't need to understand the politics in detail to feel that something wasn't stable. And I was reading the news for the first time. But there wasn't article about Pakistan,

and it said that the military data zero hack had allowed the opposition leader Benizib Buto to come back into the country. And it was speculating about the fact that this was political

“liberalisation, and there might be trouble. And I can remember reading this and thinking,”

"Well, as long as the trouble doesn't happen in the airport in the next half hour, it's not my problem. I'm not coming back." As Michael mentioned, even the newspapers would reflect it. Headlines speaking of power, control, and change, but beneath the optimism was an undercurrent of

page. So in Michael's stood there about to board a commercial flight, reading those headlines,

“it was a reminder of where he was. Of how quickly normal life in this region could be disrupted,”

however, of course, what he could never know was just how quickly this disruption would become

very much his problem. There are people standing by the plate glass windows looking out for the plane. It was a little bit late, but it came in a beautiful, cloudless day, not hot because it was still only about 26 in the morning, and it parked itself a little distance away, and then buses came and took away a few people who had flown from Mumbai to Karachi and had no idea how lucky they were,

but they were getting off this plane in Karachi and then took economy class passengers out to the

“plane, and then a couple of little buses drove us out and there at the front of the plane”

two mobile staircases going up to the front two doors, first from business going up the front

staircase, economy going up the second staircase, and at the bottom of the staircase, there's people in uniform, there's a sort of panam official, there's a soldier, a soldier with a Lee Nfield 303 rifle, looking very business like, you know, it's got the sort of barrier on that's just so magnificent, the stars and the creases in his trousers and so on, and he's there to stop anybody doing anything, but I gave him, you know, no thoughts to all

I just walked past up the stairs, top of the stairs, flight attendant looks at my boarding pass, it's just a 13B just back here, and in between those two doors on that port aisle where I just come in four rows back, there is the largest seat I have ever seen, you know, on a plane or off a plane, and nobody in 13A between me and the windows, so I'm getting sort of twice as much room as I've played for, and so I put the big bag on that seat and opened it to get a book out,

and then I was going to sort of see where I could get rid of the bag, and I had my hands in the

“bag looking for a book, and again, you know, I can still put myself in that moment, and remember”

I was thinking, I've caught the plane, what can go wrong now? I've never think this, you know,

never think this because something might, and in that position standing in the aisle, hands in the bag, I heard a noise, but I was to Michael, as he settling into his nice big business class seat, not far behind him before hijackers, Zayed Hassan, Abdel al-Latif Safarani, and Zayid, Abdel Rahim, or Fahad, Mohamed Abdullah Khalil Hassan, or simply Khalil, and Mohamed Ahmed al-Manawar. As Michael says, the first he was aware that something was happening

when he heard this commotion, as he looks in the direction of where the noise is coming from, he sees a man wrestling with one of the flight attendants. He was best as a Pakistani civilian, he had a sort of banging cotton shirt on him, banging cotton trouser, he had put the round glasses, put the stash, and a gun. He had a handgun, and his arm wrapped around the flight attendants' neck. She had a telephone in her hand,

you know, pressed against her mouth, she was saying something to somebody about what was going on, but he was struggling, hand shouting something, and there was the sound of gunfire. Michael almost transfixed by what was going on was frozen, staring at what was unfolding in front of him. You know, I didn't sort of think of ducking or going to hell for running away, I just stared at it completely non-plastic by what was happening. And then there was an

noise in the door that I just come in, I turned around, and there's a man in uniform. And to my untrained eye, it was the same as the uniform with the man I'd seen at the bottom of the stairs with

rifle, and this man was shouting, "Get down, get down, again, by initial ridiculous thought."

“Was this man his own eyesight? Even in that moment, I was trying to tell myself, this is not my”

problem. I tried to tell myself, this is something to do with Ben and Zia Butter, but that's a Pakistani man. I guess at a deep subconscious level, I don't want to think that that man is an Arab, because if this is a Pakistani problem, it's probably not my problem. And maybe what's happening is there's a rioting crowd of Ben and Zia Butter supporters outside, and one of them's got on the plane of the security is now, you know, come to protect us. Now I just walked up the

steps, I'm seed rioting crowd approaching, you know, there was just a sort of ridiculous thing that trying to make sense of a situation that had just gone out of control very, very quickly. And the man in the front door, he was then shouting at the flight attendant who just showed me

to see it and said, "Close the door, close the door." Now that's okay, because the problem is outside,

he's protecting us from the outside, but then he, she wouldn't, she sort of froze and he threatened her with the gun. And okay, I'm less happy about that, that doesn't sound right. So he reached out, close the door, and then he said to her, "Where is the captain? What is up these stairs?" Chapter 6. Ladies and gentlemen, if you make any sudden movements, you will be shot. So the aircraft that these men had chosen to take over wasn't obscure, it wasn't unfamiliar,

it was a Boeing 747, one of the most recognizable commercial planes in the world.

By the mid 1980s, most people knew it's basically layout, the white body, the long cabin,

and the distinctive upper deck at the front, the upstairs, where the pilots for this iconic aeroplane, sat, that set the 747 apart from almost every other aircraft in the sky. A simple few minutes of research would have told you that. And yet when these men stormed the plane, it quickly became clear how unprepared they really were. They didn't know what the upper deck was, they had to ask the flight attendant what's upstairs, they asked where the captain was,

they moved through the cabin not with confidence but with questions. It didn't appear to be some sort of coordinated takeover, it was confusion playing out in real time.

“The cockpit on a 747 isn't exactly hidden, it's not a secret, but these men didn't seem to”

know where to find it. This uncertainty can be almost more terrifying because a lack of planning doesn't make a hijacking less dangerous. In fact, it makes it far more volatile. When people don't know what they're doing, decisions become reactive, emotional, and unpredictable. Michael could tell almost instantly this wasn't a group executing some sort of rehearse plan. This was a situation spiraling inside an aircraft filled with hundreds of people, led by men

who hadn't even taken the time to understand the space that they were trying to control. If you've seen enough bad films, you sort of start to think, if you've seen, you know, die hard and air force one, and things like that. You think that terrorists have a criminal mastermind who sort of planned this operation to the end degree,

but to actually not even know where the cockpit is on a jumbo jet, is amazing.

You know that they had caught with this plan, they'd been in the country for a couple of weeks, they'd scoped out the airport, realized that they couldn't go through the terminal building, so they had made up some security arts uniforms and just sort of drip up to the plane, and ran up the steps, brushing aside the soldiers, but they didn't know where the pilots hit on a jumbo jet. However, there was a positive to this lack of planning,

“because it would in fact be crucial to ultimately saving many lives.”

As what it did was allowed time for the pilots to react. So the flight attempt, the second door shouting warnings into her intercom, I did, I heard from the flight engineer on our plane afterwards, I spoke to him,

And they had a discussion, and they said, "Well, what do we do?"

“Which is interesting. And what is more interesting, which I don't think would happen now,”

the flight engineer said, "Well, go and have a look." And so he left the cockpit, he got an axe out of the emergency equipment, which is somewhere there, and went down stairs, carrying an axe. An upstairs in the, in the, in this extra business class seating, there are seven passengers, the flight attendant, who presumably think, "Oh, flight engineer has got the axe out."

Always come back up the stairs a lot quicker than he went down. What are we doing now?

You know, I'd say an important piece of learning. At the first sign of the axe, I am going to open a door and believe, you know, I feel that the axe is never a good thing to see on a plane. But he went back into the cockpit, shut the door, he said she's not wrong. He told me that they have the vote on it. Now, and again, that's extraordinary. There's lots of different stories put out by people who are, I guess, probably trying to avoid liability, and, you know, as to

what the policy was, whether there was a policy, whether it was left to the pilots' discretion, but they had a vote. And he said it was two to one that we should immobilise the plane and believe.

“And there's the only way of immobilising the plane. And they got stick for it.”

And I've seen the pilot interviewed, and you could see it, it was hard. I mean, that's what he said. It was hard, leaving the plane knowing that he was putting his cabin crew in the front line, knowing he was abandoning his passengers. We'll get to it, but ultimately it saved everybody's lives, really. I mean, you know, say everybody's lives. Absolutely. You know, I don't feel the vote of two to one, probably possibly the captain was the first new vote to stay.

Because, you know, partly, there'd be this sort of nagging feeling, you know,

I'll never hear the end of this. You know, I'll always be the guy who ran away.

And yet it was the right thing to do, which I think, therefore, makes him the bravest man. So have done that knowing that it would always fall to him. So as the pilot's jump from the plane, making their way back to the terminal on foot, incredibly, no one at the terminal was even aware of what was unfolding on the plane. And there were more passengers trying to get on to the plane.

And so they arrived at the terminal building. And there's a bus load of economy class passengers trying to persuade the security guard to let them go and join in. You know, they're saying, "Oh, we want a board. You know, here are our boarding passes." And then the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer, come the other way. It says, "Excuse me, and just sort of go through." And they whisper to Sardin, "We think somebody's hijacked our plane." And then, "Oh, dear."

You know, "Well, but go up to the controller." And so the idea of a sort of instant response to a crisis is impossible. Crisis crisis is a difficult and there was just confusion to start with. With confusion outside of the plane, starting to build into a crisis. Meanwhile, on the plane, it was just as confusing as well as chaotic. Michael says that all sense of time really for him has just been lost to the sheer absurdity of what was unfolding. However, on board, an air host

this name sunshine who would go on to undoubtedly save many lives was remaining calm, as well as cunning, in order to buy them all more time. She volunteered to show one of the hijackers where the cockpit was, you know, because she saw that he was up, agitated, and he said, "Well, where is the pilot?" So she said, "Well, the pilot's upstairs and take my man to the cockpit." So she went upstairs, but 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. And so she went and stood on in front of the door, not loudly on the door and said, "Pilot, Captain, there's a hijacker

“out here, would like to talk to." There's a hijacker out here, Captain, and she denied having a key.”

So I mean, she did have a key. She could have opened the cockpit door, but she was trying to give the pilot time. And eventually, if the guy pulled her out the way kicked in the door and stepped inside, and sunshine said, "He didn't look up, you know, people don't look up." So he see the empty chairs.

I've always loved the thought that maybe they left their jackets on the back of the chairs or something.

And he said, "Where is the captain?" And she said, "I don't know." He was here. I'm sure he was here. And she said that they spent a couple of minutes searching the cockpit, you know, in sort of open cabins, and they went back downstairs and said, "We can't find the captain." When back upstairs with the leader, who noticed the open hatch, then he's got to change his plan because he wanted to fly somewhere

must have taken some time. I can't remember, I was just sort of frozen still. And then they said,

“"Everybody up, everybody back." And in this changed situation, they needed the clear”

the front of the plane, so that then I was sort of secure area to control the situation from.

And so, you know, here I am on my first ever business last flight, I'm being downgraded,

I mean, quite early on. And like a good civilian, I picked up my hand luggage and walked with it, down the aisle, one hand up, one hand hold of the hand luggage. Because it, you know, it's more important to me than my life, this hand luggage. Yeah, ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. So everyone is quickly ushered to the rear of the plane into economy. With the number of passengers having not made it onto the flight, there were a few spares seats dotted around.

Michael Spotswann and Manoeuvres himself towards it, as he does so, he notices the emergency exits

“of the wing, making a mental note of it. A later on, should he have an opportunity to escape?”

He wants to know exactly which way to run. He climbs into the economy seat, and they are

much smaller space with his oversized luggage crammed in with him. And so, you know, with hand loads, my feet, my knees are in my chest, and my hands up in the air, and people sat in the aisle, because they weren't chairs for everybody. And we had this strange moment, or extended moment, whereas thinking, this is very frightening, but people get off hijacks. You know, I was telling myself, "Stay calm, make yourself inconspicuous. Do what you

told. People will go home. I could be one of those people now. Making myself inconspicuous in a large red duvet jacket. It's a bad start." But so, what I felt like could do, I could, I sank as low as possible in the seat, I brushed the Panama hat off my head so it was in my lap. And so, now, they could only see my hands above the seat, and I told myself, "It will be all right."

“And I think, a couple of other things about that. There was an announcement by a female voice.”

I immediately realized it was one of the flight attendants, and she said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the group responsible apologise for any inconvenience caused. Their argument is not with you. They do not wish to hurt anyone. But if you make any sudden movement, you will be shot." And this was an extraordinary thing. I mean, through the day they made announcements,

they were always made by the flight attendants, they always started ladies and gentlemen,

and sometimes it was ladies and gentlemen, we're going to bring around some coffee. And sometimes it was ladies and gentlemen, if you do this, you will be shot. But it was always in the same tone, the same light calm tone, which I think kept everybody calm. It was an extraordinary performance. And when you find out, as I found out, many years later, that this was incredibly inexperienced cabin crew. They had all been recruited in Mumbai,

they were all Indians, they had been recruited the previous year. Some of them had flown eight times, nine times, a handful of times, and this was what they had to deal with. One of the crew members that day was a young woman named a poor. In a later interview, she would state, "The hijack is far from over for me and my colleagues." Some of us, passengers and crew alike, are still struggling with the skeletons of the past.

Trying to fix the puzzle of incidents, sequences, people who were involved in the chain of events. Panam Flight 73 and its 394 passengers in 13 crew were now being held hostage on the tarmac of Karachi airport. A plane that was full of many nationalities, nationalities that included Europeans and Americans. The Michael admits that in a very brutal way he felt comforted by the fact that the Americans would likely be the focus of the hijack as

attention. Everybody looking around, I'm thinking, "Who's in front of me?" This is a very brutal thing to think, but it's very comforting. I was sitting next to me with two people who looked

And so the next announcement was ladies and gentlemen, "Well, Mr. Michael, Joel, please come to the front of the plane." Next time, on what I survived. [Music]