At one point the plane landed in Yemen and the pilot managed to escape by saying he needed to inspect the plane. The Yemeni officials forced him to return to the plane when the hijackers threatened to kill passengers if he wasn’t returned.

Can you imagine his relief having escaped a horrible and stressful situation, only to be sent back to certain death. The guy knew dead certain that he would be killed since the co-pilot was still on the plane. He is said to have begged not to be sent back but he was forced to return at gunpoint. He was immediately forced to kneel in the aisle and was executed.

You might say the guy was a coward for abandoning his post and you might be right. I recall being extremely conflicted at the time. He had a wife and two young children. The pathos was in the probability that had he not escaped he would have probably survived, or if his escape had happened in a democratic country, it is not likely he would have been forced to return to certain death.

German special forces stormed the plane at it’s next stop in Mogadishu and all passengers and crew were rescued. The pilot was the only friendly fatality.

Anyway, this story is not exactly covered up in the way that you recall the Cuba to Miami hijacks, but the details of his escape and abandonment of the passengers is never mentioned and he was given a posthumous medal for bravery by the German government.

Although the Wikipedia list of commercial airline hijacks lists none of these episodes, I remember them distinctly during my high school years. They never failed to make the newspapers. I wonder why they have been removed from the records.

After a few years, airliners started to get highjacked from the USA to Cuba, no doubt revenge acts by agents of the Cuban government. As I recall, no one was hurt in any of these escapades, although the Cubans invariably kept the planes in Havana for elaborate (and very expensive) multi-day “safety inspections” and pre-flight maintenance
while their passengers were given the full VIP treatment at Havana tourist hotels. After a while, hijackings in both directions stopped.

I want him to have gotten away with it, but he probably didn’t survive the jump.