It is completely feasible to demand
that all airline pilots have aggressive combat training as part of their
standard. By this I do not mean
extensive weapons training so much as having the correct mindset. He understood that his weapon was the
aircraft itself and that it must be used.
If every hijacker faced the certainty of that response, no hijacking
would ever take place.
After all, the cockpit door will be
locked and it will be necessary to seize control of the cabin crew. That is impossibility if the plane enters a
dive to 10,000 feet and executes a high g pull out as well. Anyone not strapped in will be hurt and possibly
incapacitated as well. Thus the pilot
was able to charge into the cabin and take out the threat. A weapon would have then been handy.
Such training would certainly have
quelled the 9/11 plot completely simply because it depended on the pilots following
training which was to effectively cooperate.
Not one terrorist team would have completed their mission and likely all
would have been subdued. It gets awfully hard to move about it the pilot is
twisting and turning at high speed.
How to thwart a gunman at 29,000
feet, by the only pilot who ever did
With world
attention focused on MH370, Uri Bar-Lev recalls how he saved his El Al
passengers from an attempted skyjacking, and says other pilots should have been
trained to do the same — on 9/11 and in countless other cases
BY MITCH GINSBURG March 24, 2014, 2:14 pm 54
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-to-defeat-airplane-terrorists-from-the-only-pilot-who-ever-foiled-a-skyjacking/#ixzz2wt5gwzHI
With the world’s attention focused on Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370, a retired El Al pilot, a veteran of five armed hijacking
attempts and plots, including one movie-worthy standoff at 29,000 feet,
splashed some local brandy into his afternoon tea.
“When you
don’t know, you just don’t know,” Uri Bar-Lev said of the fate of the airliner,
speaking two weeks after it dropped off the radar.
Then, while he was folding the Hebrew paper,
which was splayed open to the MH370 story of the day, came an endearingly
familiar routine, the ritual dance performed by so many Israelis of Bar-Lev’s
1948 generation: Why do you want to hear this story? What’s so special about
it? It’s been told before. Haven’t you read it? Why would people want to hear
it now?
The Times of Israel mentioned the missing plane
and hinted at his heroics. We said there might be a lesson to be learned or
simply a tale worth re-telling. He waved his hand dismissively, but, fresh from
Pilates and in a rush to finish his chores before setting off for Chile the
next day to visit a newborn grandson, the 83-year-old pilot agreed to deliver
the abridged version of events.
On September 6, 1970, Bar-Lev, who had flown as
a 16-year-old in the 1948 War of Independence and later during the 1956 War,
was picked up from his Amsterdam hotel and brought to Schiphol airport to fly
the second leg of El Al Flight 219 from Tel Aviv to New York. Before take-off,
El Al’s security officer on duty at the airport told the pilot that there were
four suspicious people seeking to board the flight. Two held Senegalese
passports with consecutive numbers; two others, a couple, carried less
suspicious looking Honduran passports, but all had ordered their tickets at the
last minute.
Bar-Lev, in consultation with the security officer,
barred the Senegalese passengers from boarding and demanded that the local
security officers closely inspect the two Honduran nationals before allowing
them to board.
Although at the time he did not know that no
such inspection had been performed, he stopped at seat 2C and had a chat with
Avihu Kol, one of the two armed security officers on the plane. “I told him, I
want you in the cockpit with me,” Bar-Lev said.
Kol was alone in first class. He might as well
have been wearing a sign that said air marshal. “Someone could just come up
behind him and shoot him in the head,” Bar-Lev said, recalling that Kol had
warned him about just such a scenario two weeks before.
Skyjackings were not a new phenomenon. During
the previous year alone, dozens of planes had been hijacked. Yet El Al was the
only airline in the world to field armed guards and re-enforced steel cockpit
doors — precautions that had been put in place after the 1968 hijacking of an
El Al jet to Algeria, the only time Israel’s national carrier has been
hijacked. Kol, though, initially resisted Bar-Lev’s demand that he sit in the
cockpit, saying it contradicted his orders. Finally, Bar-Lev pulled rank.
At 29,000 feet, with the plane still climbing,
the emergency light flashed in the cockpit. False alarm, one of the crew
members said. It happened often. Flight attendants sometimes grazed against the
warning panels, sounding the alarm. “No,” Bar-Lev responded, “we’re being
hijacked.”
Seconds later a flight attendant’s voice came
through the intercom: two people, armed with a gun and two grenades, wanted to
enter the cockpit. If he didn’t open the door, they would blow up the plane.
Bar-Lev sent flight engineer Uri Zach to look
through the peep hole. The “Honduran” man, Nicaraguan-American Sandinista
supporter Patrick Argüello, a former Fulbright scholar operating on behalf of
George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was
holding a gun to a female flight attendant’s head. Uri, she said to the pilot
through the locked door, they are going to kill me if you don’t open up.
According to the International Air Transport
Association rules, Bar-Lev said, a pilot is responsible “for the welfare of his
passengers” and therefore must acquiesce to the demands of terrorists. His
thinking was just the opposite: acceding will only further endanger the
passengers. Giving voice to an unformed thought, he said aloud, “We are
not going to be taken hostage.”
Sitting in the right-hand seat, having let the
co-pilot handle the take-off from Amsterdam, Bar-Lev recalled his mandatory
training on the Boeing 707 at the company headquarters several years earlier.
The certification training was eight hours long. After six hours, the company
instructor told Bar-Lev he was cleared to fly and wondered if he had any other
questions. He did. He wanted to know the outer limits of the plane’s capacity.
The instructor, a Korean War vet, walked him through some of the maneuvers and
explained that the passenger plane was very strong and could endure more than
it would seem at first glance.
The plane began to plummet, dropping 10,000 feet in a minute
Bar-Lev told Kol, the air marshal, to hold on
tight. He was going to throw the plane into a dive. The negative g-force, akin
to the feeling one gets on the downhill section of a roller coaster ride, would
accomplish two things: it would lower the plane’s altitude, reducing the
pressure difference between the inside and outside of the plane, which would
make a bullet hole or a grenade explosion less dangerous; and it would throw
the hijackers off their feet. The passengers, he said, were all belted in and
would be fine.
Bar-Lev lifted the nose of the aircraft, dipped
one of the wings, and then tilted the nose down to earth. The plane began to
plummet, dropping 10,000 feet in a minute. When he pulled out of the dive, Kol
charged through the door and killed Argüello.
The second terrorist, Leila Khaled, a
Palestinian veteran of previous skyjackings, rolled a grenade forward but it
didn’t explode. In her memoir, Bar-Lev said, Khaled claimed to have been
violently subdued, but the air marshals found her passed out from the dive and
quickly arrested her.
“The whole thing took two and a half minutes,”
Bar-Lev said.
But it was far from over. Three other planes, in
what Bar-Lev called a more complex attack than 9-11, had been hijacked. The two
men carrying Senegalese passports had commandeered a Pan Am flight and flown it
to Egypt. TWA and Swiss Air flights were flown to Jordan. The Shin Bet, via an
El Al dispatcher, sent Bar-Lev a terse command: About face. Come home.
On board he had two armed Shin Bet officers —
Kol, and a second agent who was at the back of the plane — plus a dead man and
an internationally wanted terrorist. Pivotally, though, he also learned that
Shlomo Vider, the chief flight attendant, had charged the hijackers and been
shot several times. Before responding to the Shin Bet’s orders – Bar-Lev didn’t
know and wasn’t told about the other hijackings – he called for a doctor to
come forward and examine Vider. The most qualified person was a dentist. He
ruled that Vider was in stable condition. “I didn’t think so, though,” said
Bar-Lev. Vider was pale and though he had been shot, he didn’t seem to be bleeding
out, raising concerns about internal bleeding.
Bar-Lev told Tel Aviv that Vider didn’t have
five hours left in him. He was going to request permission to land in London.
Headquarters again ordered him to return to
Israel, but Bar-Lev contacted the British authorities and began to descend. En
route, he heard the voice of an El Al pilot preparing to take off from Heathrow
to Israel. “I told him to switch to the internal frequency,” Bar-Lev said.
Speaking quickly and in Hebrew, he told the
other pilot the situation and the plan: he would land near him. In the
commotion, no one would notice if the two armed Shin Bet marshals slipped
through the flight engineer’s maintenance door between the wheels and quickly
boarded the Israel-bound plane in the same way. The last thing he needed was
for the two to be arrested by the local authorities and possibly charged for
killing Argüello.
He insisted that he had simply flown the plane throughout and
did not know how the Nicaraguan terrorist had died
Bar-Lev had good reason for concern. In February
1969 a Shin Bet air marshal named Mordechai Rachamim had fought off a squad of
terrorists attacking an El Al plane in Zurich. After jumping out of the
airplane door under fire, apprehending three of the terrorists and killing the
fourth, the Swiss authorities, before finally exonerating him, first put him on
trial for manslaughter.
After Bar-Lev slowed the plane to a stop, the
crew welcomed an emergency British medical team on board. Vider, he later
learned, reached the local hospital an estimated five minutes from death. But
when Bar-Lev tried to close the door and head back to Tel Aviv, several armed
agents from the British secret services drew their sidearms and said, “Do not
shut that door. You are on the soil of
Bar-Lev and the rest of the crew were taken for
interrogation. Asked what he told the British authorities, he said, “I told
them nothing.” He insisted that he had simply flown the plane throughout and
did not know how the Nicaraguan terrorist had died.
An El Al security officer, in the meanwhile,
printed tickets for the two Shin Bet air marshals who had slipped onto the
Israel-bound flight and, after going through the passenger list repeatedly, the
British authorities were forced to let the plane take off.
Bar-Lev and the crew were released the following
day. The British authorities knew they were lying but could find no proof.
Leila Khaled remained in the United Kingdom. She was let out of British custody
three weeks later, after a British jet was hijacked on September 9, en route from
Bahrain, expressly in order to secure her release.
For Bar-Lev, though, the
ordeal was still not over. Upon return
to Israel, a man he did not recognize took him into a side room and began
asking questions: Why had he insisted on bringing the sky marshal into the
cockpit? Why had he refused a direct order to return to Tel Aviv? Why had he
dismissed the dentist’s assessment?
The next day, El Al Director General Mordechai
Ben-Ari told him that the Shin Bet would not provide security for Israel’s
national air carrier so long as he remained an active pilot. Ben-Ari tried to
convince him to take a year off, to pacify the Shin Bet, and then return to
service.
“In those days, though,” Bar-Lev said, “you
could still call the prime minister.”
He phoned Golda Meir and asked to explain his
side of the story. After giving his version of events to Meir, Moshe Dayan and
the head of the Shin Bet at the time, he was given a two-week holiday and then
reinstated, with honors for bravery.
Several months after that, then-transportation
minister Shimon Peres helped pass a new law that gave pilots the right to
resist hijackings and immunity against foreign lawsuits, such as the one Pan Am
filed against Bar-Lev for not alerting the airline to the danger posed by the
two Senegalese men and the one the British authorities briefly pursued – to
charge Bar-Lev as an accomplice to murder.
Today, though, he said, despite the thousands of
deaths caused by airline terror since that day in September 1970, there is
still not a consensus among airlines that pilots are part of the inner circle
of protection against terror. Lamenting the tragedy of 9/11, and the way 2,977
innocent people were killed by 19 hijackers wielding household objects such as
penknives, he said the “formula for prevention” is for the crew to be trained,
in mind more than in body, to resist.
“As long as you know you’re not going to allow
it to happen, then you’ll find the way,” he said.
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