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Chapter 1: What happened during the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking?
Pakistani commandos stormed a hijacked Pan Am Jumbo jet this afternoon. It was the jet carrying about 400 people. The latest report is that at least dozens of people were left wounded and about 15 persons dead in a withering hail of automatic weapons fire.
Flying is something most of us will do several times in our lives. Sometimes it's a short domestic hop, other times a long haul journey across the world. On any given day, roughly 100,000 commercial flights will take off and land globally. And yet, for many people, stepping onto an aircraft is still an anxious experience.
There's a fear of flying itself, being sealed inside a metal tube, travelling at hundreds of kilometres an hour, 35,000 feet above the ground. The knowledge that if something were to go wrong up there, you're completely reliant on the people in the cockpit. Hello, Jack. Mr Thexton, how are you, sir? I'm very well. Thank you very much. I very much appreciate your time, sir.
Thank you very much indeed. Before every flight, we carefully walk through the safety procedures. Seatbelts, oxygen masks, emergency exits, what to do if the cabin fills with smoke, what to do if there's a water landing. But there's one scenario that's never discussed. No safety card explains what to do if someone were to take control of the plane.
So she went upstairs. By the time she got to the top of the stairs, in front of the hijacker... she realised that she needed to give the pilot time to escape.
For most of us, hijackings feel like something from another era, something associated with the headlines of the 1970s, or something that only truly entered public consciousness after September 11, 2001. It's not something passengers actively prepare for, and it's certainly not something anyone expects to experience firsthand.
I was telling myself, stay calm, make yourself inconspicuous.
In 1986, even less so. Air travel was different then. Security was looser. Doors to the cockpit weren't reinforced. The idea that an ordinary commercial flight could suddenly turn into a hostage situation wasn't part of the average passenger's mental checklist.
And yet, for Michael Thexton and the rest of the passengers and crew aboard Lufthansa Flight 73, that unimaginable scenario became a reality before the plane's wheels had even left the runway.
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Chapter 2: Who was Michael Thexton and what was his connection to the flight?
And a letter to me, you know, described me as his best pal. And I don't remember that. He obviously wrote letters to me. The thing was that I sort of I worshipped him.
Growing up, Michael had three siblings. Of course, there was Peter, his older brother, and two sisters, one older and one younger. Michael and his sisters wouldn't be sent to boarding school like their older brother. By the time they came along, Michael's parents had decided that boarding school probably wasn't the right decision. Michael believes his parents always regretted sending Peter.
However, it would be while at boarding school that his brother discovered what would become his life's passion.
At boarding school, he started climbing. It was, it became his passion. He was in the Boy Scouts and they did, they went camping and then they did small rock climbing and gradually it became the thing that he really wanted to do. So he went, when he stopped coming on family holidays, he would be off camping in Scotland or camping in the Alps in France or Switzerland.
and climbing bigger and bigger mountains. And that was his passion.
Very adventurous guy. And I think you sort of said in the past that you weren't as much of the adventurous type as your brother was?
No, it was... I wanted to be, obviously. You know, people want to be what their heroes are. And so I used to... I tried rock climbing when I was at... Peter would go on to become a doctor.
a profession that would allow him to continue to follow his passion of climbing. Because as a junior doctor, you would do a six-month rotation of jobs. So Peter would work for six months and then take six months off to go climbing.
Most doctors sort of move on from that quite quickly and start taking longer jobs. But he didn't. He just carried on doing these six-month junior doctor jobs. I think when he went on his last expedition, he was just coming to the point where he thought, I have to grow up a bit now. I have to get serious about this.
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Chapter 3: How did Michael's brother Peter influence his life and decisions?
this path that was laid out for me because Pete wasn't there anymore. And I mean, you know, the sad thing is I obviously wasn't going to become a mountaineer. That was impossible because I don't have the head and heights. What I decided to do, rather sadly, was become a best-selling novelist. I read a book by Geoffrey Archer and thought, well, that looks pretty easy.
And so I wrote a book and a friend of mine read it and he said, well, I don't think you should leave your day job. I then went into teaching accountants because that was a job a bit like Pete's jobs. You could teach a course for accountants and then you could take
a couple of months off yeah if you wanted to and do something else and i decided that i would try and do some adventurous things so i went to china as a backpacker in the summer of 1985. i don't really have the appetite for being a backpacker either it was uh that was pretty hard but you know at least at least i'd sort of done something i'd gone somewhere
interesting and come back with some traveller's tales and that could have been what I would do after that.
That summer, some of the students from the medical school where Pete had trained as a doctor as well as where he'd been a leading light of the mountaineering climbing club that was also run from St Mary's Hospital got in touch with the family to ask if they would be happy for them to hold what they were calling the Thexton Memorial Expedition.
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And so they had an expedition in his memory, which went to Kenya and they climbed Mount Kenya. My friends who I'd gone climbing with, with Pete, they happened to be also in Kenya that summer. And I got a postcard from them saying, have met the Pete Thexton Memorial Expedition. Pete will be turning in his grave, that these guys were perhaps not quite as competent climbers as Pete had been.
But at the beginning of 1986, they said, we had a really good trip to Kenya and we are going to go to Lobsang Spire, this last mountain that Pete climbed. And we're going to, you know, this is the area where Pete died. Would Mike like to come and be the base camp manager? So I was supposed to be the base camp manager. Obviously, I had to go.
There's no way I was not going to take that opportunity. I would never get another opportunity to go to the place. They weren't planning to go to base camp at Broad Peak, but it's only a couple of days further on from where we were going to be based. And so we reckoned I could probably walk up there with some equipment companions. And so that's what we did in July of 1986.
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