The Effect of Living Backwards
In preparation for the exam, I'd been up all night in my dorm room reading and rereading case studies of various post-Big Terrible hijackings. None of these case studies followed a pattern, and thus trends were difficult to spot, and possible countermeasures by passengers, difficult to contemplate. Two particular hijackings stuck in my mind as representative of the new brand of unpredictable disorder.
The first was the case of Malaysian Air Flight 879, which departed Bangkok at 10:15 a.m. on November 23, 2003, en route to Kuala Lumpur. It carried, among other passengers, a British rugby team, a famous Malaysian industrialist, and ten infants who were being escorted by five adoption authorities - in reality members of a Burmese liberation front known as the Red Veil - who had smuggled knives aboard in their charges' diapers.
It was an unusual case, made even more unusual by the black-box transcripts, which created s highly atypical terrorist portrait. The lead operative, a man who called himself King Tabinshweiti, stated repeatedly to the passengers that he did not intend to crash the plane into any building in Kuala Lumpur, the destination city; he intended only a 'regular old hijacking,' in which, at worst, a few people on board might die if his demands were not met. It would not be hyperbolic to describe Tabinshweiti's speech to the passengers as a strange and supplicant form of salesmanship; his pitch was devoid of the usual terrorist threats, it was reasoned and beseeching in tone, indicating that he was acutely aware of his need to "sell" his hostages on the terms of their captivity, for fear of being terrorized himself.
Despite Tabinshweiti's artful talking, nobody believed him. The hijackers were overpowered by the members of the British rugby team, the plane went into a tailspin and crashed into a harbor off Koh Pipi, and all sixty-nine people aboard were killed. Interviews with Tabinshweiti's family suggested that he had been telling the truth, and the members of the British rugby team, heroes for twenty days, were rebranded as overzealous hotheads. After the incidents with Malaysian Air Flight 879, passengers were counseled not to act too hastily in the case of a hijacking; an international coalition of mental health professionals met with the World Airspace Coalition to generate an "Is You Hijacker Suicidal?" checklist, to be laminated and placed in airplane seat pockets along with emergency procedure brochures.
Quite an unusual book. I am still thinking about it so don't feel ready to write about it yet. |
