The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career.

On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10 crew. Two of those passengers were armed. Within half an hour the aircraft was the only one of five hijacking attempts that day that did not end with an airliner in the hands of the hijackers, and the reason traces back to a pre-flight argument about where the sky marshal would sit.

The two men who did not board

El Al security at Schiphol flagged four passengers. Two were travelling on consecutive Senegalese passport numbers, which is the sort of detail that ends a journey. They were refused boarding. The other two, a couple on Honduran passports, were questioned and let through.

The two refused at the gate simply bought tickets on Pan Am Flight 93 instead and hijacked that aircraft the same day. The couple who were cleared were Leila Khaled, a Palestinian member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who had already hijacked a TWA aircraft the year before, and Patrick Argüello, a Nicaraguan-American.

Bar-Lev was not satisfied. He asked for something that was against El Al’s own procedure: he wanted the armed sky marshal, a Shin Bet officer named Avihu Kol, seated in the cockpit with him rather than in the cabin. He got his way. Remember that, because it is the hinge of the entire story.

Twenty-nine thousand feet

About half an hour after take-off, climbing through roughly 29,000 feet, the pair moved. Argüello went forward, Khaled produced two grenades, and they demanded the flight deck.

Shlomo Vider, the chief steward, charged them and was shot several times. He would spend the rest of the flight bleeding on the cabin floor.

Bar-Lev did not open the door. He did something that reads as desperation and was in fact arithmetic. He had taught aerodynamics; he knew what a sustained pushover does to anything not strapped down.

He pushed the nose down and held it. The passengers were belted in and stayed in their seats. Everything else in the cabin, including two people standing up with weapons in their hands, went to the ceiling and then to the floor. Khaled lost her footing, and by some accounts consciousness. The grenades went with her; one was later found not to have detonated.

He held the descent at around 10,000 feet per minute for about two and a half minutes. That is not a stunt dive and it was not random. Losing altitude also reduced what an explosion would do to a pressurised cabin, and it put the aircraft somewhere a depressurisation would be survivable.

And because the sky marshal was in the cockpit rather than the cabin, there was an armed man behind the one door the hijackers could not get through, in the one position from which he could come out behind them. Kol came out and shot Argüello. Passengers and crew held Khaled down.

The whole thing took a few minutes.

The second decision

The emergency was not over, because Vider was dying on the floor.

Israeli command ordered Bar-Lev to bring the aircraft home to Tel Aviv. He worked out that Vider would not survive the flight, and took the aircraft into London Heathrow instead. British medical teams met it. Vider went to hospital and lived. Argüello died on the way to the same hospital. Khaled was arrested by British police.

What happened to the captain

Here is the part that the viral retellings leave out, and it is the most interesting thing about the story.

Bar-Lev was initially treated as a hero and then faced institutional consequences for two things: diverting to London instead of Israel, and putting the sky marshal in the cockpit in breach of procedure. The head of Shin Bet pushed for his dismissal over the cockpit decision, the same decision without which the hijacking would probably have succeeded.

He appealed directly to Prime Minister Golda Meir, who intervened. He kept his job, and was advised to take some leave while it blew over.

That is how safety culture actually works, and not only in 1970. A procedure exists because somebody thought hard about the general case. A captain breaks it because he is looking at the specific case. If he is wrong he is reckless, and if he is right he is still in breach, and the organisation has to decide which fact it cares about. El Al decided both at once.

The four that got through

Flight 219 was one attempt among five, and the only one that failed. Over four days the PFLP took TWA 741, a Boeing 707, and Swissair 100, a DC-8, both to Dawson’s Field, a desert strip in Jordan. Pan Am 93, a Boeing 747, was taken by the two men Schiphol had turned away, flown to Cairo and blown up there. On 9 September BOAC 775, a VC10, was added to bring British leverage into the negotiation, because Khaled was in a British cell.

Around 310 hostages were moved to Amman and released by 11 September. Fifty-six Jewish hostages and six American men were held back at the airstrip. On 12 September the three aircraft at Dawson’s Field were blown up in front of the world’s cameras, which is the image most people carry of the whole episode.

The hijackings triggered the crisis that Jordanians call Black September. King Hussein declared martial law on 16 September and moved against the Palestinian factions operating in his country. On 30 September the last hostages were exchanged for Khaled and three PFLP prisoners held in Switzerland. She was flown out of Britain and released.

Lo que cambió

September 1970 is one of the dates aviation security is measured from. Five aircraft in four days, taken with pistols and grenades carried through airport checks that barely existed, is what turned hijacking from a recurring nuisance into an industry-level problem.

What followed over the next few years is the architecture passengers still live inside: universal baggage and passenger screening, hardened flight deck doors as standard rather than as an El Al peculiarity, and international conventions obliging states to prosecute or extradite hijackers rather than treat them as a diplomatic inconvenience. El Al, already the most security-conscious airline in the world in 1970, went further still, and its procedures became the reference point everyone else measured themselves against.

Bar-Lev kept flying. Asked about it decades later, he was unsentimental about what it had cost him and what it had not.

He also read Khaled’s memoir, he has said, because he wanted to understand how the person on the other side of that cockpit door had seen it.

A note on the version circulating

This came round on Instagram from the account flight_routexplorer, and the account of events is accurate. Three things are worth adding to it.

The dive is usually described as losing about 10,000 feet in a minute. Bar-Lev’s own account is a descent rate of roughly 10,000 feet per minute sustained for about two and a half minutes, which is a longer and more deliberate manoeuvre than the shorthand suggests.

The decision that mattered most is missing entirely. Putting the sky marshal in the cockpit was a breach of procedure made before departure, and it is the reason there was an armed man in the right place when the moment came.

And the ending is missing. Bar-Lev was nearly dismissed for that same decision and had to go to the prime minister to keep his job. A story about a captain who does the right thing and is punished for it is better than a story about a captain who does the right thing, because it is the one that tells you something about how organisations behave.

Sources: Uri Bar-Lev interviews in The Forward and J. The Jewish News of Northern California; PBS American Experience, Hijacked; Wikipedia entries for the Dawson’s Field hijackings and Uri Bar-Lev; Pan Am Museum Foundation news archive; flight_routexplorer on Instagram; Afterburner reporting