Holocaust victim

On September 6, 1970, Captain Uri Bar-Lev was preparing to pilot an El Al plane full of passengers from Amsterdam to New York. It was the second leg of a trip that started in Tel Aviv.

Just before takeoff, a security officer at Schiphol airport told him that there were four passengers who seemed suspicious: two had Senegalese passports that contained consecutive numbers, and the other two had Honduran passports. All of these passengers booked their tickets right before the flight.

Bar-Lev made sure the Senegalese passengers couldn’t board, and asked for a thorough security check of the other two passengers – but, unbeknownst to him, it never happened.

He thought that when the “Hondurans” boarded the plane that they were cleared. But just to be safe, he asked a security officer, Avihu Kol, to accompany him to the cockpit instead of sitting in first class. There had been many hijackings on different flights lately, and Bar-Lev didn’t want to take any chances. El Al was the only airline to have security officers on their planes; this rule was instated after an El Al flight to Algeria had been hijacked in 1968.

As the flight was climbing at 29,000 feet, the emergency light went on in the cockpit. Bar-Lev knew right away that the plane was being hijacked and that the “Hondurans” were responsible.

A flight attendant announced on the intercom that two people with guns and grenades wanted to get into the cockpit, and if they couldn’t, they would kill everyone on board. When flight engineer Uri Zach looked through the peephole, he saw a hijacker holding a gun to a flight attendant’s head.

The hijacker was Patrick Argüello, who was part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a Nicaraguan-American Sandinista supporter. The flight attendant said Argüello was going to kill her if Bar-Lev didn’t open up the cockpit and let him and the other hijacker inside, Leila Khaled.

Bar-Lev had to think quickly. El Al had trained its pilots to give into the hijackers’ demands instead of trying to be a “hero.” A crewmember urged Bar-Lev to let the hijackers in.

But Bar-Lev, who was a teenaged pilot in the 1948 War for Independence and served in the 1956 war, knew he couldn’t do that. If he did, they might kill everyone on board. He announced: “They will not hijack my plane.”

He then made a move like the “Split S” combat maneuver used during World War II, initiating a nose dive. This would knock the hijackers off their feet and protect the passengers who were strapped in. This dive would also ensure that a grenade explosion or bullet would not be as dangerous. The plane dove 10,000 feet in just one minute. The hijackers were thrown to the ground. When Bar-Lev completed the dive, Kol quickly killed Argüello.

Leila Khaled, a Palestinian who had hijacked other planes, rolled out a grenade down the aisle but it didn’t go off. She passed out and was arrested by British authorities. (She was released a month later in exchange for hostages who were taken in another hijacking.) The whole incident happened in two and a half minutes.

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