The History Room
The Last Plane at Tegel Airport Has Survived Hijackers and Cold War
The Last Plane at Tegel Airport Has Survived Hijackers and Cold War - Parked far from the runway, the dilapidated 707 is an artifact of Berlin’s divided past..
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Retirement for this 707 means being parked beside a forest
On September 6, 1970, four flights heading from Europe to New York were hijacked in a coordinated action by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Two of the aircraft wound up landing in Jordan on a desert airstrip called Dawson’s Field. Another was diverted to Cairo. Intense hostage negotiations followed.
The pilot of the fourth plane, El Al Flight 219, managed to subdue the two hijackers on board by sending the aircraft into a nosedive 20 minutes after taking off from Amsterdam. One of the hijackers, Nicaraguan-American Sandinista Patrick Argüello, was shot and killed by an air marshal. The second, Leila Khaled, who had already hijacked TWA Flight 840 a year earlier, was overpowered and arrested. During the attack, Argüello critically injured flight attendant Shlomo Vidor. Seeking speedy medical attention for the injured attendant, pilot Uri Bar-Lev disregarded instructions to re-route to Tel Aviv and landed safely in London.
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The Boeing 707 from that fateful flight is today parked in the far southwest corner of Berlin’s recently shuttered Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” Airport. One of the plane’s passenger doors hangs off its hinges. Two sets of boarding stairs in similarly bad shape are lined up neatly adjacent to the aircraft. Mold grows over its mid-century livery, which marks the plane as a Lufthansa 707, not El Al. This curious tableau is clearly visible from the other side of the razor wire-topped fence separating the end of the airport from a trail at the edge of the Jungfernheide forest. The plane is historic for several reasons, but its days are numbered.
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This is its story: https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...airport-berlin
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