Shortly after leaving Palma de Mallorca on the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, somewhere over the south of France, a young man with a pistol walked into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 737. The holiday flight to Frankfurt was carrying 86 passengers and five crew. It would not reach Frankfurt. For the next five days the aircraft, named Landshut after the Bavarian city, became the most watched object in West Germany.

Lufthansa Flight 181 zigzagged across the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Horn of Africa while governments closed their runways against it. In Aden its captain was murdered in front of his passengers. In Mogadishu, in the early hours of 18 October, a police counter-terrorism unit that most Germans had never heard of stormed the aircraft and brought every remaining hostage out alive.

That is the part of the story most people know. Less well known is what happened to the aeroplane: repaired, returned to service, sold on, and finally left to rot at an airport in north-east Brazil, until the German state bought it back for roughly the price of a small car. Next week marks 49 years since Mogadishu. The Landshut sits in a hangar on Lake Constance, waiting for an exhibition that Berlin can barely agree to pay for.

The German Autumn

The hijacking did not come out of nowhere. Five weeks earlier, on 5 September 1977, the Red Army Faction had kidnapped the industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer in Cologne. The kidnappers demanded the release of RAF prisoners held in Stuttgart’s Stammheim prison, among them Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s government stalled. So the RAF’s allies in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine raised the stakes. Four hijackers, two men and two women, boarded the Landshut in Palma with two pistols, four hand grenades and plastic explosive. Their leader, Zohair Youssif Akache, called himself Captain Mahmoud. Their demands matched the Schleyer kidnappers’ list: eleven RAF prisoners freed, two Palestinians released from a Turkish jail, and 15 million US dollars.

The months that followed have a name in German history, the Deutscher Herbst, the German Autumn. For the passengers on board, who were mostly holidaymakers coming home from Mallorca, the politics were remote. What they knew was the gun.

The Operations Room’s animated reconstruction of the five-day flight and the assault in Mogadishu, with the route and the airfield layout mapped out.

Five days, six airports

Mahmoud first ordered the aircraft to Cyprus. Short of fuel, the crew put down in Rome, where the Italian authorities refuelled the jet and let it go. In Larnaca a local PLO representative tried to talk the hijackers into releasing the hostages over the radio and was shouted off the frequency. Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Kuwait refused to let the Landshut land. It came down in Bahrain in the early hours of 14 October, then flew on to Dubai.

Dubai was where the aircraft sat longest, and where the ordeal turned physical. The Landshut stood on the apron in the Gulf heat. When its auxiliary power and air conditioning failed, the cabin temperature climbed, the toilets overflowed and the hijackers rationed everything. Captain Jürgen Schumann managed to tell the authorities how many hijackers were on board. When that leaked into the news, Mahmoud threatened to kill him.

On 16 October, with West German envoy Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski and GSG 9 commander Ulrich Wegener now in Dubai pressing for permission to storm the aircraft, the hijackers forced the jet back into the air. Oman refused it. Aden, in what was then South Yemen, blocked its runways with vehicles. Nearly out of fuel, the pilots had no choice. They landed the 737 on a strip of sand alongside the runway.

Aden: the murder of Captain Schumann

Schumann was 37, a former Luftwaffe pilot who had flown the Chasseur stellaire F-104 with a fighter-bomber wing before joining Lufthansa in the late 1960s. After the rough landing in Aden he was worried, with good reason, that the battered aircraft was no longer safe to fly. The hijackers let him out to inspect the landing gear and engines.

He was gone far longer than they expected. What he did out there remained unclear for decades; a television documentary in 2008 traced the Yemeni officer who met him at the airport and said Schumann had pleaded for the aircraft to be kept on the ground. When Schumann climbed back aboard, Mahmoud forced him to kneel in the aisle and shot him in the head, in front of the passengers, before he could explain himself.

It is worth pausing on what came next, because it is the most extraordinary piece of airmanship in the whole affair. First officer Jürgen Vietor, 35, now had to fly a damaged airliner whose engines had swallowed sand and whose landing gear had taken a beating, alone, with a gun at his back and his captain’s body on board. In the early hours of 17 October he lifted the Landshut off the sand and flew it across the Gulf of Aden to Mogadishu, landing there at around 04:30 Central European Time.

Mogadishu

Somalia was a dead end. The hijackers had run out of countries willing to take them, and the aircraft was in no state to go anywhere else. Mahmoud set a deadline for the RAF prisoners to be released and then, by most accounts, began preparing to blow up the aircraft, dousing hostages in duty-free alcohol. The flight attendants, among them 23-year-old Gabriele Dillmann, later known in the German press as the Angel of Mogadishu, did what they could to hold the cabin together.

Bonn bought time with a lie. The hijackers were told that the prisoners were being flown out and would arrive within hours. Meanwhile Wischnewski negotiated with Somalia’s president, Siad Barre, for permission to act, and a Lufthansa Boeing 707 carrying the GSG 9 assault force slipped into Mogadishu after dark with its lights off.

At 00:05 CET on 18 October, 02:05 local time, the assault teams went in. They had approached from behind the tail, the 737’s blind spot, carrying ladders to every door and to the overwing exits. A diversion at the front of the aircraft drew Mahmoud towards the cockpit; the doors came open; officers shouted at the passengers to get their heads down. The shooting lasted only moments. The whole operation, codenamed Feuerzauber, Magic Fire, took roughly seven minutes.

Three of the four hijackers were killed, including Mahmoud. The fourth, Souhaila Andrawes, was badly wounded and survived. A grenade dropped by a dying hijacker injured Dillmann and several passengers, and one GSG 9 officer was hit. Every one of the 86 passengers and the four surviving crew came out alive.

Period news footage from Mogadishu airport after the GSG 9 assault, as the freed hostages are brought away from the aircraft.

The night that did not end in Mogadishu

Relief in West Germany lasted a matter of hours. That same morning, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found dead in their cells at Stammheim; the deaths were ruled suicides. The RAF responded by murdering Hanns Martin Schleyer. His body was found on 19 October in the boot of a car in Mulhouse, across the border in France.

For GSG 9, founded only five years earlier after the Munich Olympics massacre, Mogadishu changed everything. The unit came home to a hero’s welcome at Cologne/Bonn airport, and requests for its training poured in from abroad. Schumann was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit posthumously; Vietor and the cabin crew were decorated too.

The aircraft that kept flying

Here the story takes a strange turn. The Landshut was not retired as a relic. It was ferried back to Germany, repaired, and returned to Lufthansa service before the end of 1977. Vietor himself went back to the cockpit within weeks of the hijacking and flew for the airline until he retired in 1999.

The 737 flew Lufthansa routes until 1985 and was then sold. Over the following two decades it passed through a string of operators in passenger and cargo service, in France, in Indonesia and in South America, under a series of registrations. Its last owner was the Brazilian carrier TAF Linhas Aéreas, which flew it as PT-MTB until January 2008. By then the airframe was nearly four decades old. TAF parked it at Fortaleza, and there, unairworthy and largely forgotten, it stayed.

Bought back for scrap value

In 2017, forty years after the hijacking, a campaign to bring the aircraft home won over the German Foreign Office. The government bought the derelict 737 for around 20,000 euros. Engineers flew to Fortaleza to take it apart, and on 23 September 2017 two Volga-Dnepr freighters landed at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance: an Antonov An-124 carrying the fuselage and wings, and an Ilyushin Il-76 with the seats and other parts. The total bill for the return was put at around 10 million euros.

Some of the people who had been on board in 1977 were there to meet it, and so were thousands of spectators. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who had backed the project, had set out the case in a Bild interview that summer.

The plan at the time was simple: restore the aircraft to its 1977 Lufthansa colours and put it on display at the Dornier Museum next to the airport, with an opening pencilled in for 2019. It never happened. Funding, competing ministries and a long argument over who should pay the running costs left the fuselage in pieces in a hangar for years. In 2020 the Dornier foundation stepped back, and responsibility passed to the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

The Dornier Museum’s own film of the Landshut’s arrival at Friedrichshafen in September 2017, as the An-124 opens its nose to unload the fuselage.

Hall Q, and a six-month exhibition

The agency settled on Hall Q, a former aircraft hangar beside the runway at Friedrichshafen. On 22 October 2024 the fuselage was towed the few hundred metres from storage into its new home. The agency’s early line was that the jet would be conserved as it came back from Brazil, scars of four decades of other airlines included, rather than repainted to look like 1977.

The money has proved harder than the hangar. In June 2026 the agency’s new president, Sönke Rix, wrote to former hostages that the learning site would open on 18 October 2027, the 50th anniversary of the rescue, and run only until April 2028, because a long-term operation was not affordable in the current budget situation. The hall itself is leased until 2039. According to a federal government answer reported by the Schwäbische Zeitung on 30 September 2026, the state has already spent almost 8 million euros on the aircraft and the project, and the remaining rent alone comes to about 8.2 million.

The same paper reports that the agency’s current tender asks for the Landshut to look as it did in 1977 from the outside, using a film wrap rather than paint. Local supporters are lobbying the Bundestag for a permanent exhibition. What happens to the aircraft after April 2028 is, for now, officially still under review.

Why the Landshut matters

Lufthansa Flight 181 is often told as a special forces story, and Mogadishu did make GSG 9 famous overnight. But the people who carried the aircraft through those five days were airline crew: a captain who tried to keep a damaged jet on the ground and paid with his life, a first officer who flew it off a sand strip because there was no other way out, and three flight attendants who kept 86 frightened people going in a cabin that had become unbearable.

Le Landshut itself is just a 1970 Boeing 737, one of thousands. That is exactly why it is worth keeping. Nothing about it was built to be a monument. It became one on the sand at Aden and the apron at Mogadishu, and then it went quietly back to work.

In October 2027, half a century on, the public should finally be able to walk up to it. Whether it stays there longer than six months is the last unanswered question in the long life of Lufthansa Flight 181.

Sources: Wikipedia, Lufthansa Flight 181 and Entführung des Flugzeugs „Landshut“ (German); German History in Documents and Images (GHI Washington), photo and abstract on the GSG 9 return, 18 October 1977; The American Presidency Project, West German Rescue of Hostages in Somalia, White House Statement, 17 October 1977; Federal Foreign Office, Sigmar Gabriel interview with Bild, 27 July 2017; AFP via The Local, 23 September 2017; dpa via AERO International, 23 September 2017; Bundestag printed paper 21/7666, 20 August 2026; Schwäbische Zeitung, 26 June and 30 September 2026; Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Lernort Landshut; 916-starfighter.de on Jürgen Schumann’s Luftwaffe career; Bundesarchiv.