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You may see flight attendants as little more than drink and food servers, but they’re trained to save your overhead-compartment-hogging, seat-yanking ass in an emergency. Sometimes, flight attendants give their lives to save others, such as 23-year-old Neerja Bhanot, who died from terrorist bullets as she shielded three children.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 5, 1986--
Pan Am Flight 73 was travelling from Mumbai to New York, with stops scheduled in Karachi and Frankfurt. On September 5, 1986, during the Pakistan stop, the plane was stormed by four heavily armed Palestinians carrying assault rifles, plastic explosives, and grenades. Neerja’s first act of heroism was to send the hijack code to the pilots, allowing the American flight crew to escape via a hatch in the ceiling of cockpit. Thanks to Bhanot, the flight wasn’t going anywhere, and the standoff began.
One of the hijackers, holding a gun to the head of an Indian-American passenger, demanded a flight crew be sent, but was denied. The hijacker shot passenger Rajesh Kumar in the head and threw his body from the plane. The flight attendants were ordered to collect passports so the hijackers could identify any other Americans on board—because these were the “death to America” kinds of hijackers—and Neerja hid the American passports under seats or shoved them in the garbage to prevent those people from being singled out for execution.
After a 17-hour standoff, the hijackers said fuck this let’s do some killing of innocent civilians because that’s just the kind of dicks we are. They figured Pakistani commandos were going to raid the plane soon so they might as well go down in a murderous blaze of assholery. During the shooting spree, Bhanot managed to open a door at the rear of the plane. She could have been the first one off and escaped to safety, but she didn’t. Instead, she ushered passengers off, saving many lives. As she was helping three unaccompanied children off the plane, one of the terrorists grabbed her by the ponytail and shot her in the back, killing her.
The hijackers kept on shooting until they ran out of bullets, then commandos stormed the aircraft and arrested them all; an accomplice was arrested a week later. The five were tried and sentenced to death, but those sentences were later commuted to life in prison. One was deported to the U.S. and remains in prison. The other four were deported to Palestine in 2008 and are on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Of the 379 passengers and crew, 21 were killed by the terrorists. There were also many injuries.
Neerja Bhanot was posthumously awarded many accolades, including becoming the youngest person to received India’s highest peacetime honor, the Ashok Chakra Award. One of the three children whose lives she saved that day, who was only seven at the time, went on to become a pilot for a major airline. He said that Neerja is his inspiration and that he owes every day of his life to her.
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