Travelling back to boarding school after a summer with her family in Bahrain was always dispiriting and 15-year-old Miriam Moss was lost in thought when the boy sitting next to her on the plane to London gave a gasp. “I looked at him, then looked where he was staring. A man had come through the curtain, he was pointing a gun at us and his hands were shaking,” she says. “I’ll always remember that shaking gun. His eyes were wild. It was just like being in a film. Then the captain’s voice came over the intercom, saying ‘I’m very sorry to tell you we have been hijacked’.”
It was September 1970. The BOAC passenger jet was one of four planes hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a co-ordinated attack that ushered in the age of global terrorism — the precursor to 9/11 and the recent attempted massacre on the Amsterdam to Paris train.
An attack on a fifth plane had been foiled mid-air and Leila Khaled, a prominent member of the PFLP, was handed over to the British authorities. Moss’s life — and that of 113 fellow passengers and crew on BOAC flight 775 — would hang in the balance for the next four days as the hostage-takers negotiated Khaled’s release.
First, though, the plane was diverted to Dawson’s Field, a remote airstrip in the Jordanian desert. “The captain spoke to us again and explained that there was a man on the plane chained to a briefcase packed with explosives,” says Moss. “I thought I was going to die. I really did.”
Moss, now a successful author of picture books for young children, has revisited the experience for her new novel, Girl on a Plane. After “burying” the trauma of the hijacking for 45 years — when she returned to school it was thought best that it was never mentioned — she is surprised at how powerful the impact has been. “I was on a train recently and it was packed and I felt I couldn’t get out. My heart started racing,” she says. “It was an extraordinary physical response.”
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Flight 775 landed on the dusty airstrip, surrounded by camels, jeeps and gun-toting guerrillas. Moss and the others watched as the terrorists wired the fuselage with explosives and a terrifying female hijacker — “unlike some of the others she really wanted to frighten us” — told them the clock was ticking: if the British government did not respond the plane would be blown up or they would be shot, one by one.
The searing heat of the day was almost unbearable. Passengers were eventually allowed in pairs to get a breath of air at the plane’s door but Moss almost triggered a catastrophe when her belt buckle caught on a grenade slung around a terrorist’s waist and he thought he was being attacked.
Food and water promised by the hijackers did not materialise and Moss found herself helping the stewardess sort through discarded trays of food from the beginning of their journey to salvage anything edible. As the hours went by, a strange sort of normality began to creep in. She struck up a conversation with one of the guards, a Palestinian teenager “probably around 14”, who told her his parents had been killed as the family were driven from their farm.
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“You couldn’t help but feel compassionate. They had been through so much: not all the hijackers were nice but they were human,” she says. “People can say it’s Stockholm syndrome but you start to see the human being and you hear their story and they become part of your story.”
There was friction between the American and British governments as Ted Heath, then prime minister, decided to negotiate Khaled’s release. As the siege dragged on, Jordanian tanks started gathering around the airfield and Syrian troops massed on the border in anticipation of conflict.
“We saw the Jordanian tanks around us but as a 15-year-old I didn’t understand. It was only reading into it last year that I had a real sense of how close we had been to all-out war and that our planes were at the epicentre of it,” says Moss. “All that time later, that makes my blood run cold.”
Most of the hostages were released without warning after four days and put on buses to Amman, the Jordanian capital. Moss then flew on to London, where she was reunited with her parents. Khaled and some other Palestinian prisoners were traded a fortnight later.
Last year, for the first time, Moss returned to the airstrip, now home to a polo club. She gazed at the hills she once thought she would never escape. It is still not clear why Heath chose to do a deal with the terrorists. “I am just very, very glad he did,” she says.
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Girl on a Plane will be published on Thursday by Andersen Press