Pushkin

It wasn't a particularly sophisticated hijacking.

Three, somewhat drunk young men, charged into the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines plane,

grabbed a fireman's axe from the wall.

They beat up the first officer and pushed him out of the flight deck, then made their demands.

The pilot, 42-year-old Lail Abata, was an Ethiopian Airlines veteran,

he dealt with two previous hijackings.

Both times, he'd eventually managed to talk the hijackers into giving themselves up.

Both times, nobody had been hurt.

This new hijacking was alarming, but perhaps manageable.

So, outnumbered three to one in the cockpit, Lail played it cool.

He assumed the hijackers were not interested in murder.

This was five years before 9-11.

Lail reckoned the men who took over his plane wanted money, or attention,

or maybe they were desperate to be taken somewhere.

And he was right.

This was a simple old school hijacking.

The hijackers just wanted the plane to re-root.

It was November 23, 1996.

The plane, a Boeing 767, was flying from the capital of Ethiopia,

Addis Ababa, to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi.

And the hijackers wanted to go somewhere else, namely Australia.

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