Hijacking Survivors Recount Terror

Plane flew crazily as hijacker handled co-pilot's controls

by Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York Times
November 25, 1996

When two passengers burst out of their seats and ran up the gangway to the cockpit, Hiwot Tadesse, a flight attendant, thought they were having a fight. When a third followed them, holding something in his hands, she knew the plane was being hijacked.

"I pushed back my trolley and told the other girl to stop serving drinks," she said on Sunday. "The terrorists said for everyone to be seated. They said they had explosives and they were going to blow up the airplane." That moment of confusion, about 20 minutes after the plane left Addis Ababa, was the start of a terrifying four-hour ride that ended in the death of more passengers than in any previous hijacking.

Before it was over, those on board would have to endure a hijacker wielding the controls, causing the plane to careen dangerously through the sky.

The flight, bound for Nairobi, Kenya and other cities across Africa, did not have enough fuel to fly to Australia, the pilot says he told the hijackers, but they insisted on going there in any case.

The bodies have not all been recovered, but 120 of the 175 people aboard -- including a person from the Ottawa area -- are believed to have died Saturday when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 plummeted into the sea.

A Foreign Affairs spokesman said the Ottawa-area victim's family has been notified and has asked Foreign Affairs not to release the name.

The Boeing 767 struck the water once, bounced and then smashed nose first, breaking into three pieces. The airplane crashed about 500 metres from the shore, just missing a class of scuba-diving students on their first dive.

The pilot's ability to ditch the airplane just in front of the Galawa Beach Hotel, but not on it, may have saved many more lives.

The airplane seemed to be heading straight for the hotel, witnesses said, when it suddenly pitched to the right, missing the building and crashing into the water.

For the passengers, the hours in flight were a nightmare. They were told only that they had been hijacked and should stay seated. On a flight that was supposed to be over Africa, they could see the ocean below.

Tadesse said the hijackers -- reports indicate that there were 11 -- beat the co-pilot, Yonas Mekuria, and pushed him out of the cockpit. They said the hijackers spoke English, French and Amharic, Ethiopia's main language.

Lior Fuchs, an Israeli, said the hijackers "gathered in the pilot's cabin. After a quarter of an hour they threw the co-pilot out and remained with the captain.

"One of them, they claimed, had a hand grenade. He said that if anybody tried anything he would pull the pin immediately.

They said they were changing the destination. We thought that, in any event, they would stop to refuel. We never thought we would get to an emergency landing."

One of the hijackers sat in the co-pilot's seat and played with the control stick like a child, Tadesse said, making the plane dip dangerously several times. It was only in the last few minutes of the flight that the co-pilot forced his way back into the cockpit and took back his seat, she said.

Another hijacker stayed in the first-class compartment, glaring at the passengers to keep them in their seats.

"He let us feed the children," Tadesse said. When he would look down one aisle, she said, she would let passengers along the other aisle sneak to the bathroom or to get a sandwich.

Mekuria, the co-pilot, said: "The hijackers made an announcement in Amharic saying that they had just escaped from prison.

"They refused to believe the captain when he insisted he was running out of fuel and had to land at Moroni (the Comoros Islands capital). It was bizarre. They were interfering with procedures, grabbing at the instruments and controls."

Bisrat Alemu, an Ethiopian survivor, said there was panic as the hijackers took control of the plane. "They screamed that they had a bomb. One of them appeared drunk and was carrying a bottle of whisky he had stolen from the duty-free trolley."

Fuchs added: "At a certain point, the pilot announced that one engine had stopped working and that soon the second would also shut down. (A little later) I felt a great shaking and I was thrown from the seat. Water poured into the plane. I don't know how, but I managed to get out."

Frank Huddle, the U.S. consul-general in Bombay, and his wife, Shania, were also among the survivors.

"We bounced off the water four times before the aircraft broke apart," he said. "The first bump was really gentle. The second one was really hard. The third even harder, like a 70-miles-per-hour auto accident. The last one was like an earthquake."

The survivors described being trapped underwater in their seats with the waves pitching the wreckage of the fuselage to and fro, the bodies of dead passengers brushing against them as they struggled to undo their seat belts.

"We thought we were all going to die," said N. B. Surti of Bombay. "The aircraft quickly filled with water. Several times I went up and down in the water. I fought through all the bodies and everything and grabbed a broken part of the plane.

Slowly, slowly I came out."

Many that were barely hurt in the crash suffered cuts on their hands and legs as they crawled through twisted metal in the half-sunken wreckage to reach holes where they could see sunlight.

Passengers who escaped said they clung to sections of the fuselage screaming for help as the plane rocked in a sea of dismembered bodies, wreckage, and floating pieces of luggage and clothes.

Hotel scuba instructors who dived into the wreck described bodies trapped in their seats, sometimes held in the life vests they had put on when the captain said they were going down.

When the airplane ran out of fuel, Caroline Fotherby, the hotel's manager for water sports, was in her beach clubhouse.

"I heard a plane approaching, but not loudly," she said. "Then there was a crash. First I thought it was thunder, but it was sunny. Then I thought it was the volcano here, but then my staff screamed "Emirates!' I turned round and saw the wing of a plane sticking out of the water, and a tail just a stone's throw from one of my dives in progress."

Emirates, she explained, is the name of the airline that flies to the island twice a week.

Fotherby immediately called the hotel nurse and all her instructors by radio, and they rushed to the site in high-speed rubber boats, grabbing survivors where they could. A glass-bottomed cruise boat pushed off the beach and brought a dozen more survivors to shore.

The nurse set up a clinic in an open-air restaurant and eight vacationing French doctors and two from South Africa worked for hours in their bathing suits, saving the lives they could.

Officials say they do not yet know the hijackers' motive, but two of them survived the crash and are in jail here.

GRAPHIC: Color Photo: Ap Photo / Rescuers remove a body from the crash site just off the coast of the Comoros. Witnesses said Sunday the pilot steered the plane into the surf seconds before it would have hit a hotel.

Copyright 1996 The New York Times

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