Grace Kusta writes a personal traumatic experience, enabling us to see both the stress of life in Lebanon during the civil war and how she coped with it.
It was the summer of 1985, I had scheduled my annual vacation from work, planning to go spend a week in Cyprus, an island that is 265km from Lebanon by sea. During that time the news of a hijacked TWA airplane was on every news station and the latest update was that it had landed at the Beirut airport carrying a number of hostages. Well that broadcast did not delay my travel plans, nor did it even place doubts in my mind, because political and security instabilities had become normal life for us. We had survived 10 years of war already. The airport was open for planes to land and take off, and that meant that I could go ahead with my travel plans.
My Dad drove me to the airport and saw me checking through security and customs. He then left to go about his work and I waited at the assigned gate for the plane to start boarding its passengers. We boarded the plane and thankfully I was assigned a window seat which made me look forward to taking pictures during takeoff and landing. The wait in the plane was long and the pilot was announcing one delay after the other calling them “traffic delays.” After on hour of waiting we heard the echo of explosions. It was not too loud as the people in the plane were starting to get restless and noisy, but through the noise we could still hear the sound of what seemed to be more than one explosion.
Smoke with Flames
I looked through the window, and I could see a dark cloud of smoke with flames coming out of the cockpit of a plane that was parked at a distance. It was the hijacked TWA airplane! Later we knew that the hijackers had released the hostages and then blown up the bombs they had planted on it.
After another long wait our plane started to move and we took off to our destination. It was a short, one hour, flight. And as we got close enough to Cyprus that we could see it at a distance, there was a commotion caused by someone who had gone to use the washroom and come back. He was claiming that the plane had been hijacked. He did not scream or announce it publicly, but he whispered to his group of people and the rumor started spreading through the plane.
Up till that time we had not heard from the stewardess, nor had the pilot made any announcements yet, but the seat belt light lit up and a stewardess asked us to buckle our seat belts.
The Plane Was Going in Circles
As we drew closer to our destination I could see through the window that the plane was going in circles over the airport area as if the pilot were waiting for instructions; then suddenly the plane started going down at a speed that was beyond what I had experienced in my previous travels. As the plane descended at a high speed, it started shaking and that caused major panic in the plane. The landing was rough and because of the plane’s speed we passed the terminal and stopped very close to the end of the runway.
Immediately after the plane stopped there was an announcement that there was a person on the plane who was causing some trouble and that security had been notified. I looked through the window and I saw the Cypriot army surrounding the plane, and it wasn’t too long before they announced that the plane had been hijacked and that people needed to stay calm while authorities negotiated with the hijacker. Passengers were in shock; I didn’t know what to think! It was like I had a brain freeze! It felt like my mind was suddenly swamped with thousands of unorganized thoughts that my brain could not comprehend anymore.
No Time to Manipulate the Door
Within five minutes, which seemed like one hour, they asked the passengers to leave the plane through the back door. And since the back door of the plane was not commonly used by the crew, it did not open fully, so the stairs could not fit against the edge of the door. There was no time to manipulate the door to cooperate, so we had to jump to the stairs, run to the terminal, pass through the hallways and leave the terminal, for by that time they had evacuated the terminal building. We were told then that the hijacker had agreed to release the passengers but not the luggage.
Thankfully, my friend was waiting for me outside the terminal. She comforted me and then started asking me about what had happened. We were told that the hijacker had agreed to the release of the passengers but had not agreed to release their luggage. We stood around for about an hour before the situation was resolved and our luggage was brought out to us.
To my astonishment, I heard that day and later read in newspapers that there were two Americans on our plane who had been hostages on the hijacked TWA plane and were released to board our plane seeking to return to the USA!!! They must have felt jinxed.
For a Lebanese like me, it was just one more scary experience. I relaxed and enjoyed my vacation.
((The TWA hijacking and other events of that the summer are mentioned in my book, In Borrowed Houses, a true story of love and faith amidst war in Lebanon, and Grace Kusta was part of the happy, resilient group of young people important to my story. Buy the book on this website, and I will give 10% of proceeds to an organization serving Syrian refugees in Lebanon.)