Grenade at Your Feet: The Anatomy of an Absolutely Wild 1970s Hijacking
When Professor Roderick Hilsinger boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 708, he had no idea he was headed for a "best-of" of in-flight nightmares. Here’s how he—and 93 other passengers—survived.
Friday, December 8, 1972: As the captain flicked off the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign, Professor Roderick Hilsinger yawned and stretched. It was 7 a.m., a blazing East African sun rising outside the Boeing 720B’s starboard windows. Hilsinger had just wrapped up a whirlwind trip to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where he and his colleague, Dr. Richard Wylie, had given a presentation on a proposed exchange program with their employer, Temple University. Now, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 708 was headed toward the then-Ethiopian city of Asmara, the first stop of a multi-leg route to Paris, where the two would board a Philadelphia-bound jet for home.
The men were seated in the second row of the main cabin, Hilsinger in the aisle and Wylie by the window. On the inbound legs, their positions had been reversed. But as they’d boarded this morning, the 6-foot-1 Hilsinger claimed the aisle seat for himself. “It’s my turn to stretch out,” he told Wylie. “You take the inside.” A minor detail, but as with so many this morning, one that would take on outsize importance.
Now, as Hilsinger undid his lap belt and took full advantage of the extra legroom, he heard a woman speaking sharply behind him in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. At the sound of her voice, five men and another woman, spread throughout the cabin, all rose from their seats. Each of them gripped small pistols.
Hilsinger, scarcely believing what he was seeing, watched as a young man in the next row stood, raised his gun toward the man seated next to him and shot him at point-blank range.
Nobody screamed; no one cried out. Save for the whoosh of the turbofans, the cabin was silent. Hilsinger noticed that another man had come up the aisle, stopping right by his shoulder. In one hand he held a gun; in the other, a hand grenade. Now the first hijacker — the one who’d shot his seatmate — turned to face the passengers and said, this time in English: “This plane is hijacked!”
What a gripping story! Thank you!