The Dead Man’s Gambit: The crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 961
<p>On the 23rd of November 1996, three men stormed the cockpit of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767, beat the First Officer, and demanded that the Captain fly the plane — and everyone in it — to the far-off land of Australia. Unable to convince the hijackers that the wide body jet did not have enough fuel to cross the Indian Ocean, Captain Leul Abate was forced to turn his plane out to sea, and toward an uncertain fate, lest the unstable and intoxicated attackers kill him and his passengers. Running out of fuel and struggling against his increasingly erratic captors, he made for the remote archipelago of the Comoros Islands, off the coast of southeast Africa, hoping to land — but the men, slipping into a state of nihilistic despair, had decided to embark on a suicide mission instead. When they prevented him from reaching the islands’ sole international airport, Leul Abate was left with only one choice: to ditch the crippled 767 in the ocean off the coast of Grand Comore.</p>
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