Hijack Over Shanghai

 Hijack Over Shanghai

"The flight began routinely. Then, suddenly, five knife-weilding madmen turned it into a nightmare".

            The 19 American tourists waited quietly in a spartan little airfield building on the outskirts of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Behind them on this Sunday morning, july 25, 1982, lay two fascinating days of sightseeing. Next stop was the port city of Shanghai, 1,200 kilometers to the east. After Wang, their young tour guide, distributed boarding passes, the Americans and the other passengers moved to airport security, where a ground hostess conducted a cursory inspection by glancing inside the carry-on baggage. There were no metal detectors or X-ray cameras.

            At 8 a.m. flight 2505 of the Chinese national airline CAAC took off with 72 passengers and a crew of eight aboard a vintage turboprop. Flying time to Shanghai was two hours and ten minutes. The Americans settled in to reading and dozing. They were old friends, middle-aged and elderly, most from rural New Jersey.

            Ronald Roth, 53, organizer of the tour, was seated by the left aisle in the middle of the aircraft. Most of his group was towards the rear of this main cabin, which ended in a partitioned galley. In front of Roth were three rows of seats, and then a galley on the left and a toilet on the right. Forward were a smaller seating section and the flight deck. The plane was near capacity with Chinese travellers, a scattering of Japanese businessmen and the Americans.

            At 9.50 the plane began a smooth descent through the cloud-smudged sky to Shanghai. Two minutes later a scream ripped through the aircraft as a terrified Chinese woman ran towards the back of the plane with a dozen more passangers hard on her heels. “Men are fighting with knives up there!” one passenger shouted in English.

            Two men flashing knives before them drove the people out of the front compartment and the first rows of seats in the main cabin. Both had torn off their shirts, exposing hard-muscled bodies. One was a leering, square-faced man. The other, yelling at the top of his lungs, had a long face and wild, rolling eyes. Gripped in each of his hands was a 13-centimetre straight-blade knife.

            When the intruders reached Roth’s row they fiercely gestured that he and his seatmate; W.J.Gunther, remain where they were. Through the open door of the cockpit Roth could see a man pressing a blade against the pilot’s neck. Two more were holding the co-pilot , navigator, engineer and radio operator at bay. The white shirt of one crew member was crimson with blood.

            “My God, we’re being hijacked,” Roth said hoarsely.

            “We’re Finished” The rear of the plane had become jammed with people. At least 15 were packed into the aisle. Two stewardess cowered in the galley there. The third advanced defiantly down the aisle and knelt at Roth’s side, her eyes blazing with anger.

            The long-faced hijacker standing before them was shouting in Chinese. “He says to sit still and be quiet,” warned Wang, who was sitting across from Roth on the right side of the plane the hijacker continued his howling speech.

            Two rows behind Wang, Wilbur Lance, 76, a retired banker, and his wife, Leila, heard the Japanese around them whispering. One scrawled a note and handed it to Lance. “They’re going to Hongkong, refuel, then to Taiwan to be liberated.”

            Meanwhile the aircraft had commenced a series of sharp banking turns, flying in and out of clouds. It shuddered and bucked in the turbulence, and the sound of vomitting was heard above the drone of the four propellers.

            As Gunther went into a fit of retching, Roth pressed back in his seat. Relax.it’s like being on a giant wheel. He looked out of the window. A cloud loomed out of the blue. Immediately the plane into its centre. Roth had no doubts: the pilot was deliberately flying into rough air in an attempt to throw the hijackers off balance.

            With feet spread wide and knees bent to take the bumps, the square-faced hijacker produced a 25-centimetre-long dynamite stick. Grinning, concious of a hundred eyes watching him, the pushed in a detonator cap trailing a fuse wire and then fitted a push-button triggering device to the free end of the wire. The bomb was put inside the toilet, with the fuse snaking under the door and the trigger secured under the nearest front-section seat.

            “We’re fineshed,” Gunther announced through his nausea. He took rosary beads from his pocket and began to pray silently.

            From his aisle seat, Stephen Domovich, 57, superintendent of a New Jersey youth correctional institution, had been watching with the same sense of doom. More than 30 years’ experience with delinquents and criminals convinced him that the hijackers would explode the bomb at any provocation.

            Domovich’s grim missing was interrupted by Al Dunn, who was sitting in front. “Hey, Steve,” Dunn said from the side of his mouth. “We’re circling.” The domed stadium that Dunn had seen when the plane had first begun its descent to Shanghai was below him again. It was clearer, bigger. The plane was not only circling, it was losing altitude. He estimated that they were at little more than 1,500 metres.

            The pilot was pursuing a daring deception in probable ignorance of the bomb in the cabin. But the hijackers were apparently unaware that the plane was circling; not one of them had thought to look out of the windows.

            During the first 50 minutes of the takeover, the crew members on the flight deck concentrated on the hijackers, alert to any chance for attack. Suddenly the plane tilted and the co-pilot lunged at the knife nearest him. He fell back with blood gushing from a gash in his cheek. The stewardess next to Roth was on her feet, shouting and shaking her fist.

            Victory Cry. The wild-eyed hijacker strode up to her and bellowed an order. Retreating to the galley, she brought him a bottle of orange soda. The man hacked the glass neck from the bottle with the blunt edge of his knife and poured some of the drink into a cup. After one swallow he refilled his mouth and spat the liquid at the Americans in front. Contemptuously he sent the jagged bottle spinning up the aisle. No one in the cabin dared react to the lunatic performance.

            The plane banked and trembled. Dunn felt a drop of water on his face. The air conditioning had been turned off. Condensation dripped from the air nozzles. The cabin had become a fetid oven.

            More than two hours into the hijacking, the engineer and the radio operator were released to the main seating section. One was unhurt, but his comrade had been savagely cut about the face and head. Together they disappeared into the back alley.

            Suddenly the sound of wild shouts spun the Americans around their seats. They could hardly believe their eyes. The two crew men were charging down the aisle with thick, wooden mob handles held in the joust position. Dunn watched them rush by.

            Thundering behind the engineer and the radio operator were half a dozen passengers wielding soda bottles and iron heating coils wrenched from the galley stove. Up front, Roth and Gunther were both shouting. “No! Stop! There’s a bomb!”

            Roth grabbed the mop of the lead man. By lunging across Roth’s back, Gunther got a hand on the second mob. A japanese man in the pack began shrieking, “Out of fuel! Out of fuel!”

            The two Americans looked out of the window. Both propellers on the left side had ceased turning. The die was cast. Better  to go down fighting. They released their grips on the mop handles and in one voice yelled, “Go!”

            At that instant the bomb exploded. It blew the toilet walls into the aisle and near-by seats, and opened a ragged, metre and a half hole in the fuselage. Because of the low altitude there was no feeling of depressurization, just the sweep of air through the gaping hole and the magnified roar of the two still-spinning propellers on the right wing.

            The raiders used this momentary distraction to storm the hijackers. Wang was in their midst, whacking away with a furled umbrella. The plane staggered, and then dipped forward. The pilot was grappling with the man who held a knife at his throat.

            Out of Control. Roth was conscious of the brutal struggle in the forward section, of men screaming and falling. Then a Chinese passenger was raising his arms above the melee, smiling and shouting an unmistakable victory cry. The hijackers had been overpowered. But too late, thought Roth. The plane was out of control, diving for the ground. “Take crash positions!” he yelled.

            Al and Carol Dunn were embracing. “We’ve had almost 35 years,” Al said, lifting his voice above the din. “The children are grown up. They’ll be okay…..”

            “I’m glad you’re with me,” said Carol. She linked her arm with her husband’s. as they braced themselves, Al Dunn took a final glance outside. The plane was plummering towards ponds greening with rice plants. Closer….closer….

            Then Dunn felt the nose of the plane lift, saw landing flaps hinge out from the wing. “He’s got control

! He’s going to land!”

            Rice fields flashed by only metres below his window.

            The plane hit with a thump, blowing out the front tyres and setting a shower of sparks under the wheels. Dunn was incredulous. They were screeching along on concrete. “It’s a runway!” His voice fairly boomed through the cabin and the Americans broke into a sponteneous applause.

            Ambulances were running abreast of the plane, the word “Shanghai” painted on their sides. Trucks filled with soldiers lined the airstrip.

            As soon as the crippled aircraft halted, the emergency exit behind the rear galley was yanked open and a platoon of armed men leapt aboard. They ran the length of the plane and came back dragging the unconscious hijackers.

            Roth picked his way through the wreckage of the bomb and the combat, and walked up to the valiant pilot, Yang Jihai, a big framed man in his early 50s.

            “Thank you,” said Roth, holding out his hand. It..seemed in adequate. Roth gave the pilot a bear hug and then felt the pilot’s arms around him. When the two men stood apart both had tears on their cheeks.

            Inside the terminal, the Americans learnt that all traffic had been diverted from the airport during the nearly three hours that Flight 2505 had been widely circling above. A bus was readied for the party, and when they were all aboard, Roth turned and kneeled in his seat.

            “Today is Sunday,” he said. “I think it would be appropriate if we sang a hymn of praise.”

            The words came softly at first; then the hymn filled the bus and echoed lustily down the highway to Shanghai..Nineteen American men and women sang joyfully at their deliverance: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…..”

            Captain Yang and his crew were awarded orders of merit at a ceremony in Beijing. The five hijackers, following a two-day trial in Shanghai, were executed.

"God gives every bird his worm, but he does not throw it into the nest"

                                                      -swedish proverb