Reginald Levy was the English captain of a Belgian Sabena airliner hijacked by Palestinian Black September terrorists in 1972 after taking off from Vienna, and later stormed by Israeli commandos on the tarmac at Tel Aviv.
The commandos, who needed only 90 seconds to kill or disable the four hijackers and rescue the 100 passengers and crew, were led by Major Ehud Barak, now Israel’s defence minister, and included Benjamin Netanyahu, now prime minister, who was wounded by a hijacker’s bullet.
Drawing on his experience under German fire while bombing Hamburg and Berlin as part of RAF Bomber Command, Captain Levy remained coolness personified when two men wearing nylon-stocking masks burst into his cockpit on 8 May 1972, his 50th birthday. One put a gun to Levy’s neck while the other held a grenade against the co-pilot’s face. Only too aware that his wife was in the first row of First Class – Sabena had allowed her to join him for a birthday celebration in Tel Aviv – the captain famously told his passengers over the intercom: “As you can see, we have friends aboard.”
The “friends” included two young women from Black September who were wielding Semtex-based bombs in the cabin, threatening to blow up the Boeing 707 unless 317 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails. Levy, surprised that he was being hijacked to his scheduled destination – Lod airport (now Ben Gurion) in Tel Aviv – transmitted a coded message to the control tower. He also got a message to his crew not to reveal that his wife was on board. After landing at night, the aircraft was guided to a remote tarmac, under the watchful eye of Israel’s defence minister General Moshe Dayan, who sent out two saboteurs to deflate the tyres and disable the aircraft’s hydraulics.
Told later that the aircraft couldn’t take off, the hijackers started kissing each other in apparent farewell and spoke of blowing up themselves and the plane. Levy spent the night talking quietly to them, trying to calm them down. “I talked about everything under the sun, from navigation to sex,” he said later.
The next morning, the hijackers sent Captain Levy to the terminal buildings with samples of their explosives to show they meant business. He took the opportunity to give Dayan details of where the hijackers were positioned and where the women had the black vanity bags carrying their bombs. He also provided the key fact that there was nothing blocking the emergency doors. Back on board, he said Dayan had agreed to their demands but the plane needed work before it could take off. Crucially, he also persuaded the hijackers to open the emergency doors slightly, due to the stifling heat in the cabin.
drive from www.independent.co.uk