This Isn't The First Time Someone Tried To Hijack A Plane Out Of Love

The motives behind the hijacking of an EgyptAir flight, which was diverted to Cyprus, remain somewhat unclear. The suspected hijacker, an Egyptian man identified as Seif Eldin Mustafa, has been arrested after a brief standoff. There are no reports of injuries among the plane's passengers, and investigators are not casting the incident as a terrorism plot.

Cypriot authorities described Mustafa as "unstable." Though reports are conflicting, some witness accounts allege that he had a letter for his estranged wife, who lives on the island, and demanded to see her. She was reportedly en route to the airport in Larnaca.

"Always there is a woman involved," Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades quipped at a news conference, not to everyone's amusement.

"He's not a terrorist, he's an idiot. Terrorists are crazy, but they aren't stupid. This guy is," an official at Egypt's Foreign Ministry told the Guardian.

That may be unkind to Mustafa, who, whatever the case may be, clearly was operating under some distress.

Whenever episodes of "skyjacking" take place, it's instructive to refer to the research and writing of British American journalist Brendan I. Koerner, author of the critically acclaimed "The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking." After news of the latest hijacking broke, he offered valuable context on his Twitter feed about past such oddball attempts and the particular personalities of those who resort to commandeering planes.

One anecdote Koerner cites is worth bringing up in the context of Mustafa's alleged gambit. In 1971, Richard Obergfell, a former Navy aviation mechanic, hijacked a flight en route from New York to Chicago in an attempt to reach a pen pal in Italy, a woman with whom he had fallen in love.

Obergfell, 26, had tried other tactics. "Obergfell began to dedicate the bulk of his time to listening to Italian radio shows and reading Italian newspapers, so he could pick up the language," Koerner narrates. "He also applied for a job with Alitalia; when his application was rejected, he concocted an illicit scheme to reach his beloved pen pal in Milan."

This is what happened, in Koerner's words:

"Using a Walther P38 pistol that he had stolen from a New Jersey sporting-goods store, Obergfell took over Flight 335 about 20 minutes after it left New York. He did so by sticking his gun in the back of a stewardess, Idie Maria Concepcion, and telling her, "I'm not going to hurt you if you do what I say." Concepcion guided Obergfell to the cockpit, where the hijacker demanded passage to Milan. When the pilot informed him that the Boeing 727 didn't have the range necessary to cross the Atlantic, Obergfell asked for another plane capable of traversing the ocean."

But he would never make that crossing. On a runway at JFK airport, while holding Concepcion hostage, Obergfell was fatally shot by an FBI sniper, who would later be upbraided by the agency's then-director, J. Edgar Hoover, "for wearing a short-sleeved shirt while sniping." No one else was hurt.

As Koerner noted Tuesday, the peaceful resolution of the standoff in Cyprus is a pleasant departure from earlier such episodes. Moreover, the Obergfell episode isn't entirely unique. In 1961, a drunken oil worker failed in an attempt to commandeer a flight to see his estranged wife in Arkansas.

© 2016 The Washington Post

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