Tuesday, March 25, 2014

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"
Uri Bar-Lev (right), flight attendant Janet Darmijan and senior flight attendant Abraham Eizenov speak to the media on their safe return to Israel, September 1970 (photo credit: Courtesy El Al archive)
Times of Israel   ... "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." ...
....
"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."

 

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