Dawson's Field Hijackings - Hijackings - Pan Am Flight 93

Pan Am Flight 93

Pan American Flight 93 (type Boeing 747, serial 19656/34, registration N752PA, Clipper Fortune) was carrying 136 passengers and 17 crew. The flight was from Brussels, Belgium, to New York, with a stop in Amsterdam. The two hijackers bumped from the El Al flight boarded and hijacked this flight as a target of opportunity.

Flight Director John Ferruggio recalled,

"We were ready for take off in Amsterdam, and the aircraft came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the runway. And Captain Priddy called me up into the cockpit and says, 'I'd like to have a word with you.' I went up to the cockpit, and he says, 'We have two passengers by the name of Diop and Gueye.' He says, 'Go down and try to find them in the manifest, because I would like to have a word with them.' ... So Captain Priddy sat them down at these two seats over here. He gave them a pretty good pat. They had a Styrofoam container in their groin area where they carried the grenade, and the 25-mm pistols. But this we found out much later."

The plane first landed in Beirut, where it refueled and picked up several associates of the hijackers, along with enough explosives to destroy the entire plane. It then landed in Cairo after uncertainty whether the Dawson's Field airport could handle the size of the new Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Flight director John Ferruggio, who led the plane's evacuation, is credited with saving the plane's passengers and crew. The plane was blown up at Cairo seconds after it had been evacuated. An audio transcript of Feruggio's landing instructions to passengers was recorded by one of them and can be heard in a National Public Radio report.