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Chapter 1: What led Michael Thexton to be on Pan Am Flight 73?
And I said to him, I said, please don't hurt me. My brother died in the mountains. My parents have no one else. Please don't hurt me.
There are moments in our lives that feel utterly mundane as we're living them. A different choice at breakfast, taking the stairs instead of the lift, turning left instead of right, staying home instead of going out. Small moments that, for most of us, mean really nothing at the time.
however if you look back at your life now maybe the partner you're married to the job that you have maybe an accident you found yourself in you can think back to those mundane decisions that maybe led you to where you are and think what if some call them sliding doors moments a split second when our life could have gone one way or another and we chose or fate chose for us the path that led us there
For Michael Thexton, you could possibly point out a number of these sliding doors moments. Moments that he could never have known would lead him to a life or death situation. However, one of the first came just after he'd finished his pilgrimage to say goodbye to his big brother in the mountains of Pakistan.
Exhausted, hungry and desperate to get home to his family, he would receive the perfect excuse to leave the expedition team early. I'm looking at the moon in the sky It shouldn't come as a surprise but I can't sleep War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight, but it ain't me. Chapter 5 They Were Looking in the Wrong Place
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Chapter 2: What were the sliding door moments in Michael's life before the hijacking?
When I got back to the edge of civilization, which is not particularly civilized in northern Pakistan, a town called Skardu, which really is, it's the edge of nowhere. There was a bunch of letters I thought had been forgotten. Our correspondents had not got up to base camp. There were 12 letters waiting for me.
And one of them said, we're looking forward to you being back at work, teaching accountants. And I worked out the days when they said, that I was expected to be teaching, and that was the day that our flight was getting home. Now, which was sort of a week later, but we had a very cheap flight that had a layover in Egypt. And I have to say, I needed very little excuse. I want to see my family.
I want a soft bed. I'm done here. You can't really imagine, again, it's hard to remember how hard it was. I mean, we'd all been fantasizing about decent meal. We were very cheapskate expedition.
Chapter 3: How did the political climate in Pakistan contribute to the hijacking?
In deciding what provisions to take with us, And our quartermaster, I guess you'd call them, they said, well, what do the porters eat? Well, we'll have that. And by the time we realized that really wasn't enough, we were a long way from a shop. And so we'd spent two months up the mountain or six weeks up the mountains eating rice, dal and chapatis and precious little ales.
And we were just desperate for a decent meal. And I had lost probably a fifth of my body weight, 35 pounds, maybe something like that. I looked like a complete wreck and I had never been ill. I was the only member of the expedition who never got any sort of diarrhea and vomiting. Most of them got something. Well, everybody got something at some point, but I never did. And yet I was emaciated.
So once back in Skardu, Michael and a couple of others got on a flight to Islamabad in northern Pakistan and then would spend the night in an area called Rapinda, where Michael set about trying to get himself a flight home as soon as possible.
And I spent the morning going round all of the airline offices desperately seeing if I could get home for work quicker than the rest of the expedition. And there was... There was one ticket, basically. I know for a fact that I've been in British Airways, I've been in Lufthansa, I've been in Swissair.
In the Pan Am office, there was a woman who said, yes, I've got one ticket from Karachi tomorrow morning. They'll get you to Frankfurt. Then you'll have to negotiate a flight to London. But I thought Frankfurt's the right continent. So she sold me this ticket, which was a business class ticket. I mean, it was astonishing how much I spent on that.
It was more money than we had spent on the whole of the expedition's food for the whole of the previous two months. But I wanted to get home.
So that was it. He was booked for a flight home and packs up his kit. For the first time in some weeks, he's on his own.
But it was a very strange thing also that I then said goodbye to the rest of the expedition that day. And these are people that I've been living in the pockets of for the last two months.
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Chapter 4: What was the initial response of the hijackers during the takeover?
To suddenly be on my own and have to get myself from A to B without somebody telling me where to go and a couple of porters carrying my luggage, that was a very strange thing. And so a couple of them came with me in the taxi to Islamabad Airport to get a connecting, an internal flight down to Karachi. Then I got an airport bus to the airport hotel.
The person in the Pan Am office had booked me a room for the night. And then I was supposed to get myself down to the airport again for three o'clock in the morning.
Panicked that he wouldn't receive his early morning wake-up call from the hotel reception, he sits up all night, fully clothed in bed, waiting for the sunrise. And much like he feared, no call came. But he was awake and it was time to start his journey home. Little did he know at the time, but sleeping through an alarm would have been the best possible outcome.
MUSIC
I had these two big kit bags with Expedition gear in that we were trying to get home, managed to get rid of those. I'd got the Expedition's film, which in those days was not a little thing. It was a 15 kilo hand luggage bag, you know, full of cassettes of tape. And that was precious to me. I was carrying that as hand luggage and trying to make it not look any heavier than it was supposed to be.
And I had two cine cameras around my neck. I borrowed these from Pete's friend, Jim Curran. And so I was making a film as well as being the base camp manager. And, you know, everything else I was wearing. I was wearing this red duvet jacket that is quite appropriate at Urdacast, but it's...
pretty eccentric in Karachi Airport, and a battered Panama hat that had seen better days, and my mountaineering boots, because we just had too much luggage, you know, and what you can't put in the kit bags or put in your hand luggage, you have to wear. I went through the security. What they did do was they searched everything very thoroughly. They took everything out of this 15-kilogram
Although there's nothing in there that shouldn't be there apart from probably about 10 kilos. But, you know, it was quite a struggle to get it all back in again. And I mean, these days, of course, I tend to pay more attention to the security in airports. But on that day, there was a rumor afterwards that they'd had a warning. And maybe that was why they were taking everything very seriously.
But unfortunately, they were looking in the wrong place.
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Chapter 5: How did the flight crew manage the hijacking situation?
By 1986, this part of the world was anything but calm. Pakistan was still under the rule of Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, a military dictator who'd taken power in a coup nearly a decade earlier. Political opposition had been suppressed, dissidents silenced, and the country governed under martial law for much of that time. But that year something had begun to shift.
After years in exile, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto had been allowed back into the country. Newspapers were filled with speculation. Was this the beginning of political liberalisation or simply a calculated move by a regime under pressure? The uncertainty was palpable. Northern Pakistan, already volatile, sat at the crossroads of regional conflict.
The Soviet war in neighbouring Afghanistan was still raging. Refugees, fighters, weapons and ideologies flowed across borders. Intelligence agencies, militant groups and foreign interests all overlapped in ways that were rarely visible but always felt. There was a sense that things could tip at any minute. Military presence was normal. Checkpoints were common.
Armed soldiers were part of the landscape. For locals, it was life under constant tension. For visitors, it was quite unsettling. You didn't need to understand the politics in detail to feel that something wasn't stable.
I was reading the news for the first time, but there was an article about Pakistan, and it said that the military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, had allowed... the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, to come back into the country. And it was speculating about the fact that this was political liberalization and there might be trouble.
And I can remember reading this and thinking, well, as long as the trouble doesn't happen in the airport in the next half hour, it's not my problem. I'm not coming back.
As Michael mentions, even the newspapers would reflect it. Headlines speaking of power, control and change, but beneath the optimism was an undercurrent of danger. Promises of reform existed alongside threats of unrest. Hope and fear sat side by side on the same page. So when Michael stood there, about to board a commercial flight, reading those headlines, it was a reminder of where he was.
Of how quickly normal life in this region could be disrupted,
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Chapter 6: What strategies did Michael use to stay calm during the hijacking?
However, of course, what he could never know was just how quickly this disruption would become very much his problem.
There were people sort of standing by the plate glass windows looking out for the plane. It was a little bit late, but it came in a beautiful cloudless day.
because it was still only about 26 in the morning and it parked itself a little distance away and then buses came and took away a few people who had flown from Mumbai to Karachi and had no idea how lucky they were that they were getting off this plane in Karachi and then took economy class passengers out
to the plane and then a couple of little buses drove us out and there at the front of the plane, two mobile staircases going up to the front two doors, first and business going up the front staircase economy going up the second staircase. And at the bottom of the staircase, there's people in uniform. There's a sort of Pan Am official.
There's a soldier, a soldier with a Lee Enfield 303 rifle, looking very businesslike. He's got this sort of beret on that's just sewed and a magnificent moustache and creases in his trousers and so on. And he's there and
to stop anybody doing anything but i gave him you know no thoughts at all i just walked past up the stairs top of the stairs flight attendant looks at my boarding pass said yes sir 13b just back here and in between those two doors on that port aisle where i just come in four rows back, there is the largest seat I have ever seen, you know, on a plane or off a plane.
And nobody in 13A, between me and the window, so I'm getting sort of twice as much room as I've paid for. And so I put the big bag on that seat and opened it to get a book out. And then I was going to sort of see where I could get rid of the bag. And I had my hands in the bag looking for a book. And Again, I can still put myself in that moment. And remember, I was thinking, I've caught the plane.
What can go wrong now? Never think this. Never think this, because something might. And in that position, standing in the aisle, hands in the bag, I heard a noise.
Unbeknownst to Michael, as he's settling into his nice big business class seat, not far behind him were four hijackers. Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Safarani, known simply as Mustafa. Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, or Fahad. Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hassan, or simply Khalil. And Muhammad Ahmed al-Munawar.
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Chapter 7: What critical decisions were made by the pilots during the crisis?
As he looks in the direction of where the noise is coming from, he sees a man wrestling with one of the flight attendants.
He was dressed as a Pakistani civilian. He had a sort of baggy cotton shirt on and baggy cotton trousers. He had little round glasses, a little moustache. and a gun. He had a handgun and his arm wrapped around the flight attendant's neck. She had a telephone in her hand pressed against her mouth.
She was obviously saying something to somebody about what was going on, but he was struggling and shouting something. And there was the sound of gunfire.
Michael, almost transfixed by what was going on, was frozen, staring at what was unfolding in front of him.
You know, I didn't sort of think of ducking or going to help or running away or just stared at him, completely nonplussed by what was happening. And then there was a noise in the door that I'd just come in, but I turned around and there's a man in uniform. And to my untrained eye, it was the same as the uniform of the man I'd seen at the bottom of the stairs with the rifle.
And this man had a big rifle, except this was a Kalashnikov, not a Lee Enfield rifle. And this man was shouting, get down, get down. Again, my initial ridiculous thought was this man is on my side. Even in that moment, I was trying to tell myself, this is not my problem. I try to tell myself, this is something to do with Benazir Bhutto, but that's a Pakistani man.
And I guess at a deep subconscious level, I don't want to think that that man is an Arab. Because if this is a Pakistani problem, it's probably not my problem. And maybe what's happening is there's a rioting crowd of Benazir Bhutto supporters outside, and one of them's got on the plane, and the security is now... you know, come to protect us. Now, I'd just walked up the steps.
I hadn't seen a rioting crowd approaching, you know. This was just a sort of ridiculous thing, but trying to make sense of a situation that had just gone out of control very, very quickly. And the man in the front doorway, he was then shouting at the flight attendant who'd just shown me my seat and said, he said, close the door, close the door. Now, that's okay. because the problem is outside.
He's protecting us from the outside." But then she wouldn't.
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Chapter 8: How did the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 ultimately unfold?
She sort of froze, and he threatened her with the gun. And, okay, I'm less happy about that. That doesn't sound right. So she reached out, closed the door, and then he said to her, where is the captain? What is up these stairs?
Chapter 6 Ladies and gentlemen, if you make any sudden movements, you will be shot. So the aircraft that these men had chosen to take over wasn't obscure, it wasn't unfamiliar. It was a Boeing 747, one of the most recognizable commercial planes in the world. By the mid-1980s, most people knew its basic layout. The wide body, the long cabin, and the distinctive upper deck at the front.
The upstairs, where the pilots for this iconic airplane sat, that set the 747 apart from almost every other aircraft in the sky. A simple few minutes of research would have told you that. And yet when these men stormed the plane, it quickly became clear how unprepared they really were. They didn't know what the upper deck was. They had to ask the flight attendant, what's upstairs?
They asked where the captain was. They moved through the cabin not with confidence, but with questions. This didn't appear to be some sort of coordinated takeover. It was confusion playing out in real time. The cockpit on a 747 isn't exactly hidden, it's not a secret, but these men didn't seem to know where to find it.
This uncertainty can be almost more terrifying because a lack of planning doesn't make a hijacking less dangerous. In fact, it makes it far more volatile. When people don't know what they're doing, decisions become reactive, emotional and unpredictable. Michael could tell almost instantly this wasn't a group executing some sort of rehearsed plan.
This was a situation spiralling inside an aircraft filled with hundreds of people, led by men who hadn't even taken the time to understand the space that they were trying to control.
If you've seen enough bad films, you sort of start to think, if you've seen, you know, Die Hard and Air Force One and things like that, you think that terrorists have a criminal mastermind who sort of planned this operation to the nth degree. But to actually not even know where the cockpit is on a jumbo jet is amazing. They had come up with this plan.
They'd been in the country for a couple of weeks. They'd scoped out the airport. realized that they couldn't go through the terminal building. So they had made up some security guards uniforms and just sort of driven up to the plane and run up the steps, brushing aside the soldiers. But they didn't know where the pilot sits on a jumbo jet.
However, there was a positive to this lack of planning. Because it would in fact be crucial to ultimately saving many lives. As what it did was allow time for the pilots to react.
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