South African Airways - Incidents and Accidents - Incidents

Incidents

• The only successful hijacking of a SAA flight took place on 24 May 1972 when a Boeing 727 (ZS-SBE) was hijacked en route from Salisbury in Rhodesia (now known as Harare, Zimbabwe) to Johannesburg. Two Lebanese, Kamil and Yagi, took control of the aircraft by packing dynamite sticks on the hatracks. They were armed with a pistol. They forced the pilot, Captain Blake Flemington, to return to Salisbury where they landed and re-fuelled with 12 hostages remaining on board. They were bluffed by the captain into thinking that they were en route to the Seychelles, while he was in fact heading for Blantyre in Malawi. After landing the passengers used nightfall to go into the cockpit, where they climbed down the emergency escape rope. By the time the hijackers realised this, the captain, one passenger, and a flight steward, Dirk Nel, remained on the aircraft. The two hijackers started fighting with each other for possession of the dynamite fuse. In the ensuing chaos, the three captives escaped, leaving the two hijackers on board. The Malawi security forces started shooting and the two surrendered. They were jailed for two years on a charge of being in possession of an undeclared firearm on board an aircraft. After serving one year of their sentence, they were released.
• South African Airways Flight 322, 17 June 2006. South African Flight 322, a Boeing 737-800 underwent an attempted hijacking by a 21-year-old Zimbabwean, who took a flight attendant hostage in an attempt to enter the aircraft's cockpit and divert the plane to Maputo, Mozambique. He was subdued before entering the cockpit on the flight en-route from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The pilots of SAA Flight 322 had been monitoring the incident via CCTV and the plane returned to Cape Town where a police task force stormed the aircraft and arrested the suspect.