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AVIATION: HIJACK DRAMA
Hoax In The Sky
The fiasco may have helped in testing flight security
preparedness in India
By Sayantan Chakravarty and Shishir Gupta
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| REST ASSURED: A passenger of the "hijacked"
plane is greeted at Delhi airport |
All it took was
a brief telephone call wired with infinite mischief. It came shortly after
midnight on October 3 at the Delhi Airport office of Alliance Air. The
caller left word that the Alliance Air Mumbai-Delhi flight (CD 7444) had
been hijacked. Over the next five hours, TV channels went ballistic, bringing
live to millions what turned out to be a momentous low in the annals of
India's aviation history. Beamed through the night and into the wee hours,
it was the story of a hijacking that never was. There were no hijackers.
There weren't any demands, no hostages were taken. Yet, it was enough
to send the Crisis Management Group (CMG) into a huddle. Commandos surrounded
the Boeing 737 aircraft, even stormed it. Passengers missed heartbeats
and relatives broke down, all at the thought of another Kandahar unfolding
before their eyes. The two pilots prepared for the worst and sought out
weather conditions at Lahore in case they were to be forced in that direction.
In the end, the "hijacking" left senior functionaries in the
Government red-faced, for it was not even a mock drill. Just a plain fiasco.
The unknown caller who phoned Alliance's Delhi
office said the flight, which had taken off from Mumbai at 11.22 p.m.
had been hijacked. The message was passed on to the Watch Supervisory
Officer at the ATC Delhi, and after consulting the Bureau of Civil Aviation
Security chief Veeranna Aivalli it was relayed to the ATC at Ahmedabad,
the city over which the aircraft was flying.
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"This was not a
mock anti-hijacking drill."
Shahnawaz Hussain, Civil Aviation Minister |
Then began a saga of miscommunication. According
to Civil Aviation Secretary A.H. Jung, ATC Ahmedabad sent out a "garbled
message", intending to warn the flight commander Captain Ashwini
Behl that there was a possibility of a couple of hijackers being on board.
While the two ATC s are now busy transcribing the conversations, one thing
is clear: Behl, and co-pilot S. Sahay, interpreted the ATC's SOS wrongly.
Or they simply did not hear the actual words. Believing that hijackers
were on board, they promptly locked themselves inside the cockpit. Behl
then punched out the dreaded hijack code, making it flash ominously in
Delhi's corridors of power. So even as the CMG led by Union Home Minister
L.K. Advani scrambled to convene a meeting at the Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan,
headquarters of the Civil Aviation Ministry and the NSG rushed, the worst
was feared. Clarifying later in the day, Jung was to attribute the entire
event to an "incorrect choice of words".
Whatever the words (transcripts will be inquired
into by a special secretary in the Home Ministry), the outcome was ominous.
At about 12.50 a.m. on October 4, with about 4,900 litres of fuel and
46 passengers and six crew on board, Behl touched down on Runway 10 of
Delhi airport. He was made to steer towards the isolation bay area.
Inside the aircraft, confusion and fear spread
in equal measure, and fast. The cabin crew believed that somehow the hijackers
had sneaked inside the cockpit and had taken the pilots hostage. In the
absence of communication between them and the flight commanders, all they
could ask the passengers was to keep their lips sealed, and their seat-belts
fastened. Through all this silence, one thing dawned to most inside and
outside the aircraft: that it was bereft of sky marshals; all talks of
flying them on busy domestic routes, post-Kandahar, were false assurances.
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