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The Popular Front was in a quandary about what to do with the big plane, which had not figured in their plans. Apparently the two skyjackers had seized it on their own initiative. It was too large to land on the desert at Revolution Airstrip. At Beirut, guerrilla demolition experts brought a satchel full of explosives on board. One of them remained in the plane with the two hijackers and began wiring up explosive charges in the cabin and toilets during the flight to Cairo. The P.F.L.P. had decided to blow up the plane in the Egyptian capital as a sign of its disgust with Nasser for agreeing to the Middle East negotiations.
No Smoking, Please
On the final approach to Cairo, the demolition expert asked Stewardess Augusta Schneider for some matches. Handing him a pack, she cautioned as a good stewardess should: "You can't smoke now. We are about to land." The guerrilla had no intention of smoking. Instead, while the giant Clipper was still 100 feet off the ground, he lit the fuse to his explosives. As the fuse began to burn, the hijackers told the passengers: "You have eight minutes." But Captain Priddy, captive in his cockpit, knew none of this. Landing in early-morning blackness at an unfamiliar airport, he might have elected to abort the approach and go around for another landing. Fortunately, he did not.
As the plane slowed down, the crew blasted open the emergency exits, and passengers began to slide to safety on the plastic evacuation chutes. But Captain Priddy, still unaware of the emergency, inched the 747 forward a few yards, throwing some passengers from the slides. Then the crew was allowed to leave. "You have two minutes," one gunman informed Priddy as he sat in the cockpit. The crew had run only as far as the wingtip when the $25 million craft exploded into a ball of fire. Egyptian authorities seized the three commandos. At week's end, there were still no charges placed against them —partly, no doubt, because Nasser had welcomed the Athens hijackers to Cairo last July as "patriots." However, Egypt's semi-official newspaper Al Ahram pointedly noted that "the attack on international civil aviation does not encourage world feeling of solidarity with the Palestine cause."
In capitals of the nations whose citizens were being held prisoners in the desert, stunned governments started the long job of getting them home. Early Monday, Switzerland made the first diplomatic move by offering to free the three Arab hijack convicts it was holding in return for the release of the passengers and crew of the Swissair jet. But the offer was hastily withdrawn later the same day after it was privately criticized by Secretary of State William Rogers. At a Labor Day meeting with representatives of Switzerland, West Germany, Israel and Britain, Rogers stressed that one-plane deals with the terrorists would only encourage them to play off one government against another.