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"It was a miracle that so many people did get out," said First Officer Davison. "The whole thing took no more than 90 seconds." Added Flight Engineer Pfrang: "I flew C-123s in Viet Nam, but I've never experienced anything that happened so fast or in which you were so helpless."
Grisly Bluff. Somehow, 40 passengers and crewmen managed to escape, mainly through emergency exits over the wings. Many suffered burns, including one passenger who died later. But 29 more were trapped inside, including all eleven passengers in the first-class section. Among the dead: four Moroccan officials, 14 relatives of employees of the Arabian-American Oil Co. who were flying to Saudi Arabia for Christmas, and Mrs. Bonnie Erbeck, wife of the plane's captain, who often accompanied her husband on his trips.
From the Pan Am plane, the terrorists ran down the tarmac to a West German Lufthansa 737 jet that had already been commandeered by the second group of guerrillas. On board, besides the pilot and three other Lufthansa crew members, were ten hostages who had been rounded up in the terminal and outside on the tarmac. An Italian customs guard had resisted the terrorists and been shot dead outside the Lufthansa jet. At 1:32 p.m., only 41 minutes after the first shot had been fired, the plane took off with the crew, hostages and five guerrillas aboard; other terrorists may have stayed behind.
The terrorists first flew to Greece to demand the release of two Palestinians who were in prison there awaiting trial for their role in an attack at the Athens airport last August in which four people had been killed. As soon as the 737 landed at Athens, the skyjackers announced to Greek authorities that they had already murdered four of their hostages. Unless their demands were met, they said, they would take off again and crash the plane into the heart of Athens. They had actually murdered one hostage and wounded another, but the rest of their boast turned out to be a grisly bluff: they harmed none of the others, and had no intention of killing themselves. After 16 hours on the ground in Athens, the plane took off again.
Both Lebanon and Cyprus refused to allow the jetliner to land, and the terrorists finally ordered it to put down at Damascus. Syrian Air Force Commander Major General Naji Jamil tried to talk the skyjackers into releasing their hostages "for humanitarian reasons and for the sake of Arab patriotism." When the guerrillas refused, the Syrians refueled the plane, provided food and treated an injured terrorist for a head wound.
A little more than three hours later, the "mad odyssey," as one Arab commentator described it, ended in the Persian Gulf emirate of Kuwait. Again airport authorities refused landing permission. Under threat from the terrorists, Captain Joe Kroese brought in his plane anyway on a secondary runway. After an hour of haggling between the terrorists and Kuwaiti officials over conditions of surrender, the twelve hostages and crewmen quietly walked down the ramp, followed a short time later by their captors. "We are Palestinian Arabs, not criminals," declared one of them. "The criminals are the ones who bomb Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon."