On September 5, 1986, four armed terrorists stormed a Pan Am Boeing 747 at Karachi Airport. During the terrifying 16-hour ordeal that followed, senior purser Neerja Bhanot and her fellow crew members displayed extraordinary courage, helping hundreds of passengers escape. This is the story of the heroes of Pan Am Flight 73.
On the morning of September 5, 1986, Pan American World Airways Flight 73 was preparing to continue its journey from Karachi to Frankfurt.
The Boeing 747 was carrying approximately 379 passengers and crew. Among those working onboard was 22-year-old senior flight purser Neerja Bhanot, a successful Indian model who had been flying for Pan Am for just ten months.
Within minutes, the routine stopover would become a nightmare.
Four heavily armed men, disguised as airport security guards, stormed the aircraft and seized control. They planned to force the Boeing 747 into the air, fly it to Cyprus and Israel, release Palestinian prisoners and ultimately destroy the aircraft over Israeli territory.
But they had not reckoned with the courage and professionalism of the young crew onboard.
During the next 16 hours, Neerja and her colleagues helped alert the pilots, concealed passengers’ passports, reassured terrified children and assisted with the evacuation. When an emergency exit was opened and Neerja finally had the chance to save herself, she stayed behind.
She was shot while helping her passengers escape and died just two days before her 23rd birthday. Along with her colleagues, they became the heroes of Pan Am Flight 73.
A Fiercely Independent Young Woman
Neerja Bhanot was born in Chandigarh, India, on September 7, 1963. She was the daughter of journalist Harish Bhanot and his wife Rama and grew up with her two older brothers, Akhil and Aneesh. Within the family, she was affectionately known as “Lado” – the loved one.
The family moved to Bombay, now Mumbai, in 1974, where Neerja attended Bombay Scottish School before studying at St Xavier’s College.
Friends remembered her as outgoing, athletic and fiercely independent. She enjoyed basketball, gymnastics and throwball and reportedly had little tolerance for dishonesty, cruelty or bullying.
At around 18, Neerja was spotted by a photographer outside college and offered a modelling assignment for Bombay magazine. It led to a successful career in advertising.
Her face appeared in campaigns for brands including Charmis cold cream, Krack Jack biscuits and Amul chocolate, as well as clothing, baby products and household goods. At 5ft 9in tall, with a warm smile and natural confidence in front of the camera, she quickly became a familiar face in 1980s India.
However, behind that success, Neerja had already endured a difficult and painful period in her personal life.
In March 1985, she entered an arranged marriage with a man working in Sharjah. According to accounts subsequently given by her family, she was subjected to demands concerning dowry, denied adequate food and money, and placed under pressure to abandon her modelling career and distance herself from her family. Within a few months, she returned to her parents in Bombay and refused to go back.
Leaving an abusive marriage was a courageous decision, particularly in 1980s India, when separated women could face considerable social stigma. Neerja reportedly promised her father: “I will do you proud.”
Her family would later view those words as tragically prophetic.
Joining Pan Am
Later in 1985, Pan Am began recruiting Indian crew for its services between India and Europe. Around 10,000 people reportedly applied for approximately 80 positions. Neerja was among those selected and travelled to Miami for six to eight weeks of initial training.
She subsequently completed additional purser training in London. Candidates were assessed on their knowledge, leadership, passenger handling, emergency procedures, briefings and performance under pressure.
Although she was one of the airline’s newest and youngest Indian recruits, Neerja qualified as a purser.
She continued modelling while flying for Pan Am and had completed a demanding advertising assignment only hours before reporting for Flight 73. Her mother, concerned that she was exhausted, reportedly suggested that she call in sick. Neerja refused to let her colleagues down.
In the early hours of September 5, the crew transport arrived to collect her for work. Her family was already looking forward to celebrating her 23rd birthday two days later.
Clipper 73
Pan Am Flight 73 was a scheduled service from Bombay to New York/JFK, operating via Karachi and Frankfurt.
The aircraft assigned that morning was Boeing 747-121 N656PA, named Clipper Empress of the Seas. Delivered to Pan Am in June 1971, the aircraft had originally been named Clipper Live Yankee.
The flight arrived in Karachi in the early morning, where some passengers disembarked and others boarded for the next sector to Frankfurt.
Approximately 379 people were onboard when the aircraft was seized: 360 passengers (including three passriding crew members who assisted the operating crew) and 16 crew, including 13 flight attendants and three members of the flight deck.
At approximately 0600hrs local time, a tan Suzuki van approached the aircraft. It had been modified to resemble a Karachi Airport security vehicle and was fitted with lights and markings designed to help its occupants pass through the airport’s restricted areas.
The deception worked. The vehicle passed through a security checkpoint without being challenged and drove directly towards one of the two passenger stairways positioned beside the 747.
Inside were four members of the Abu Nidal Organisation, an extremist Palestinian group responsible for numerous terrorist attacks during the 1970s and 1980s. They wore uniforms resembling those of airport security officers and carried assault rifles, pistols, grenades and plastic explosives.
Two men ran towards the forward stairs while the others headed for the rear of the aircraft. At least one began firing an automatic weapon as they boarded.
Pan Am Flight 73 had been hijacked.
Sounding The Alarm
Neerja was working in the forward cabin when the gunmen entered.
According to her father’s later account, one of the terrorists grabbed her by her ponytail. Despite the weapon pointed at her, she managed to call out the hijack warning.
Speaking later to the BBC on the 30th anniversary of the hijacking, flight attendants Sherene Pavan and Sunshine Vesuwala relayed their accounts. Sherene, who was out of sight of the militants, heard the commotion, reached for the interphone, and immediately pressed the emergency call button. One of the flight crew picked up on her second attempt, and she relayed the hijack code.
Meanwhile, Sunshine saw one of the other hijackers grab hold of Neerja, put a gun to her head before she was grabbed by another militant and instructed to lead the hijackers to the cockpit.
However, Captain William Kianka, First Officer Conway Tehan Dodge and Flight Engineer John Ridgway had immediately acted on Sherene’s warning. The three men climbed through the Boeing 747’s overhead cockpit escape hatch and descended to the ground, effectively disabling the aircraft before the hijackers could reach them.
“I noticed immediately that the escape devices in the cockpit had been deployed. I noticed that the evacuation hatch on the ceiling of the cockpit was open, but I pretended not to. I wanted to give the pilots time to escape in case they were still in the process of climbing down the ropes outside the plane. The hijacker didn’t seem to know much about the plane, so he didn’t look for it,” Sunshine explained.
The decision has occasionally been misrepresented as the pilots abandoning their passengers. In reality, removing the flight crew was part of Pan Am’s anti-hijacking procedure. Without qualified pilots, the terrorists could not take the 747 into the air. Their escape probably prevented an even greater catastrophe.
The hijackers had intended to force the aircraft to Larnaca, Cyprus, where they would demand the release of Palestinian prisoners. Evidence disclosed during later US court proceedings revealed that they ultimately hoped to fly the 747 towards Israel and destroy it in the air. Grounding the aircraft had ruined the main part of their plan.
Trapped Onboard
The hijackers were furious when they discovered the empty cockpit. Their leader, Zayd Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, demanded that another flight crew be provided and threatened to begin killing hostages if the aircraft was not flown out of Karachi.
Safarini controlled the forward cabin while the other gunmen patrolled the upper deck and rear sections of the aircraft.
The passengers were ordered to keep their hands raised and their heads down, a physically exhausting position many were forced to maintain for hours. Food and drink were initially prohibited, while access to the lavatories was severely restricted.
Several flight attendants were threatened at gunpoint. One gunman held a weapon and, at times, a grenade against the head of an attendant in the rear cabin. Another prevented crew members from communicating and repeatedly played with a grenade after removing its pin.
Sherene and Sunshine were the crew who spent the most time with Safarini. He repeatedly led either Sunshine or Sherene at gunpoint up to the upper deck cockpit, using them as human shields while he peeked around them to have a look outside.
Neerja remained in close contact with the hijackers and was ordered to make announcements to the passengers. She used those moments to maintain calm and pass on instructions without causing panic.
Among the passengers was 11-year-old Preeti Bhuva, one of seven unaccompanied children travelling on Flight 73.
During Safarini’s sentencing hearing years later, Preeti remembered Neerja as beautiful, kind and calm, wearing her hair in a French braid tied with a yellow ribbon. When the passengers were eventually permitted to use the toilets, Neerja helped organise their movements through the cabin.
Hiding The American Passports
Shortly after taking control of the aircraft, Safarini ordered the flight attendants to collect every passenger’s passport. The crew understood why.
Pan Am was one of the most recognisable symbols of the United States, and the hijackers were trying to identify American passengers who could be used as bargaining tools or selected for execution.
The crew collected the passports, but deliberately failed to take some belonging to US citizens. Others were concealed in seat pockets, rubbish containers and different areas of the cabin.
Only a small number of US passports were ultimately handed over, reportedly belonging to passengers of Indian or Pakistani heritage whom the terrorists did not immediately recognise as Americans. The deception may have saved numerous lives.
The Murder Of Rajesh Kumar
Despite the crew’s efforts, Safarini eventually discovered that Rajesh Kumar was an American citizen.
Kumar was a 29-year-old California resident born in Kenya to an Indian family. He had recently become a US citizen and had received his American passport less than two months before the flight. He was travelling with his 81-year-old grandmother, Kuverben Patel, and an aunt.
Safarini ordered Kumar to the front of the aircraft and forced him to kneel beside an open doorway, with his hands behind his head.
Kumar began to cry and explained that he was travelling with his grandmother. Safarini kicked him and continued demanding that another cockpit crew be supplied.
About four hours into the hijacking, a Pan Am representative told Safarini that efforts were underway to bring pilots to Karachi. Enraged by the delay, Safarini placed a pistol against Kumar’s head.
He shot him in front of passengers, and people gathered on the ground before throwing him from the aircraft. Kumar was taken to hospital but died from his injuries.
His grandmother was also killed during the final attack. His aunt survived.
Negotiations On The Ground
While Neerja and her colleagues struggled to protect those inside the aircraft, Pan Am’s Pakistan director, Viraf Daroga, negotiated with the hijackers from the tarmac.
A Pan Am maintenance employee, Meherjee Minocher Kharas, had been trapped onboard when the aircraft was seized. Because the hijackers did not know how to operate the cockpit radio, Kharas was forced to handle communications.
Daroga attempted to prolong negotiations and prevent further executions while the authorities considered their options.
Safarini continued demanding pilots and a flight to Cyprus. Around his waist was a wide belt filled with Semtex H, a powerful plastic explosive. Investigators later concluded that it contained enough explosive material to destroy the aircraft.
The passengers and crew remained trapped throughout the day. After being unable to find any more American passengers, British passenger Michael Thexton was called to the front and made to kneel near the hijackers for much of the siege. He became convinced that he would be the next hostage to die.
In his book, What Happened to the Hippy Man? Thexton said that the crew members hiding passports were “extremely brave, selfless and clever”.
“I may be biased, but I feel that day proved that the flight attendants on board were some of the best in the industry.”
Hours passed. The cabin grew increasingly hot and airless. Passengers were thirsty, frightened and physically exhausted, but the crew continued trying to look after them.
Nupoor Abrol tried to comfort the passengers around her while her colleague Dilip Bidichandani took around sandwiches. Neerja meanwhile distributed water.
“That day, knowingly or unknowingly, we came together as a team and played our parts to the best of our ability,” said passriding crew member Massey Casper.
The Lights Go Out
After approximately 16 hours, the aircraft’s electrical power began to fail.
As darkness spread through the cabin at around 2200hrs, the hijackers apparently believed that the authorities were about to storm the aircraft.
They herded passengers towards the centre of the cabin and began reciting what US prosecutors later described as a martyrdom prayer.
Then they opened fire.
Automatic gunfire tore through the crowded cabin as grenades were thrown among the passengers. Bullets ricocheted from the interior of the aircraft, turning cabin fittings and fragments of metal into additional shrapnel.
“They had lost patience. They let out a war cry,” said Sunshine, “and began firing into the crowd. There were huge streaks of light breaking the darkness. And screams.”
Safarini attempted to detonate his explosive belt and reportedly instructed another hijacker to shoot him in the hope that a bullet would trigger it.
The explosives failed to detonate.
Amid the darkness, smoke, gunfire and screaming, passengers and crew began trying to open the emergency exits.
The Final Evacuation
Neerja ran to an emergency door and opened it, activating an escape slide. She was now standing beside a way out. She could have been among the first to escape, but she remained inside and began directing passengers towards the exit. Survivors recalled her repeatedly urging them to get out and run.
Crew members and passengers forced open three exits in total. Some survivors escaped using a slide, while others climbed onto the wing and jumped approximately 20ft to the tarmac. Many suffered broken bones and serious injuries in the fall, but remaining inside the aircraft could have meant death.
A passenger later recalled that Neerja shielded three small children from the gunfire. Although witness accounts differ over the precise sequence of her final moments, official US sentencing documents record that she remained at the exit, helped others escape and placed herself between children and the attackers.
She was shot during the evacuation.
Neerja did not die immediately. Fellow crew members found her still alive and bleeding heavily and managed to get her from the aircraft and towards medical assistance.
Her injuries were catastrophic. She died from massive blood loss shortly afterwards.
She was 22 years old.
The Question Of The Rescue
Early reports suggested that Pakistani commandos had stormed the aircraft and that their assault triggered the shooting. Later evidence challenged that version of events.
In the formal statement of facts Safarini accepted when pleading guilty in the United States, prosecutors said no Pakistani official or commando entered the aircraft until after the gunmen’s final assault had ended and the able-bodied passengers and crew had evacuated.
Security personnel then entered the 747 and arrested the four hijackers.
The mass escape was achieved mainly by the actions of the crew, passengers, and Pan Am personnel trapped inside—not by an organised rescue assault.
More than 100 people were injured, many seriously.
The precise number killed remains disputed. At Safarini’s original plea hearing, US prosecutors had death certificates for 20 victims. Before sentencing, they discovered the name of an additional Indian victim, bringing the documented total to 21. Some contemporary reports and later accounts give a total of 22.
A Heroic Crew
Neerja became the most famous member of the crew, but she did not act alone.
Hiding passports, managing the cabin, and opening exits were collective actions performed by attendants working under the most terrifying conditions imaginable.
Speaking to the BBC, Sunshine and Dilip Bidichandani explained how they had escaped onto the giant wing of the jumbo jet. Realising the slide had not inflated and unsure how far the drop to the ground was in the darkness, they climbed back into the exit they had just left and, along with other colleagues, assisted and redirected passengers to another exit which had the slide inflated. Massey Casper, one of the passriding crew members, had already exited down the slide just moments earlier, taking three unaccompanied children with him.
Unbelievably, when the gunfire subsided, and unaware of whether the hijackers were dead, and when all the passengers were off the wing, the crew went back into the pitch-black aircraft to look for survivors. The crew also stayed with the seven unaccompanied children in Karachi for two days after the attack, caring for them until they could be reunited with their families.
In 2006, the US Office for Victims of Crime recognised 16 Pan Am flight attendants who had been on board:
- Neerja (Misra) Bhanot, Senior Purser
- Lillian Netto, Purser
- Ranee Advani, Flight Attendant
- Dilip Bidichandani, Flight Attendant
- Nupoor Chakravaty, Flight Attendant
- Marian D’Costa, Flight Attendant
- Maryanne D’Souza, Flight Attendant
- Astrid Fernandes, Flight Attendant
- Cecilia Moniz, Flight Attendant
- Sherene (Viccajee) Pavan, Flight Attendant
- Nitin Salgaonkar, Flight Attendant
- Louella Soares, Flight Attendant
- Sunshine Vesuwalla, Flight Attendant
- Madhavi Bahuguna, Passriding Flight Attendant
- Massey Casper, Passriding Flight Attendant
- Samira Mistry, Passriding Flight Attendant
Viraf Daroga was honoured alongside them, as was 25-year-old mechanic, Meherjee Kharas who was tragically shot and killed by the hijackers when the aircraft lost power after manning the radio throughout the 16-hour ordeal.
Several crew members and Daroga later testified against the hijackers in Pakistan despite receiving death threats. In 2004, some travelled to Washington to give evidence during Safarini’s sentencing hearing.
After a short break, all of the Flight 73 crew returned to the airline and, at the 30th anniversary, two of the six still worked in the industry.
Justice For Flight 73
The four hijackers and their organiser, Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz al-Turki, were convicted in Pakistan in 1988. They were initially sentenced to death, although those sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.
Safarini was released from Pakistani custody in September 2001 but was immediately taken into US custody by the FBI.
In December 2003, he pleaded guilty to all 95 counts contained in a US superseding indictment. The following May, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 25 years—an effective sentence of 160 years.
The other four conspirators were reportedly released from prison in Pakistan in January 2008. They remain wanted by the United States, with rewards of up to $5million offered for information leading to the capture of each man.
Reports that Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2010 have never been conclusively confirmed, and the FBI has continued to list him as a wanted terrorist.
Honouring Neerja
Neerja’s coffin was returned to her family on September 7, 1986—the day she would have celebrated her 23rd birthday.
She was cremated the following day.
In 1987, the Indian government posthumously awarded her the Ashoka Chakra, the country’s highest peacetime award for gallantry. She became its first female recipient and, at the time, the youngest person to receive it.
Pakistan awarded her the Tamgha-e-Insaaniyat for her humanitarian courage. The honour is sometimes incorrectly described online as the Tamgha-e-Pakistan or Nishan-e-Pakistan.
She also received the Flight Safety Foundation’s Heroism Award in 1987, the Justice for Crimes Award in the United States in 2005 and, alongside her Pan Am colleagues, the US Special Courage Award in 2006.
India even issued a commemorative postage stamp bearing her image in 2004.
Her family used money received following her death, together with a contribution from Pan Am, to establish the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust. Its awards have recognised Indian women who overcome social injustice and help others, as well as aviation personnel who perform exceptional acts beyond the call of duty.
Her story reached a new international audience in 2016 through the Hindi-language film Neerja, directed by Ram Madhvani and starring Sonam Kapoor. Although necessarily dramatised, the film ensured that a new generation learned her name.
More Than A Uniform
The story of Neerja Bhanot and her Flight 73 colleagues is sometimes reduced to the simple description of a flight attendant who sacrificed herself to save hundreds of passengers. The reality is more complex—and even more remarkable.
Neerja was a 22-year-old woman who had already found the courage to walk away from an abusive marriage and rebuild her life. She was a successful model beginning a promising international aviation career. She had worked for Pan Am for less than a year and was only two days away from her birthday.
Yet when four armed men seized her aircraft, she drew upon her training and took responsibility for the people around her.
She and her colleagues helped ensure that the cockpit crew escaped, preventing the aircraft from being flown away. They concealed passports to protect American passengers. They maintained calm through hours of threats and violence. When the shooting began, They opened an escape route and remained onboard while others fled.
Neerja had the opportunity to save herself. Instead, she stayed with her passengers.
Their story serves as a powerful reminder that cabin crew are not simply onboard to serve drinks, meals or offer a friendly welcome. They are highly trained safety professionals who may, without warning, find themselves responsible for hundreds of lives.
The crew of Flight 73 demonstrated precisely what those responsibilities could demand.
Neerja, meanwhile, kept the promise she had made to her father. She made him proud—and became one of the greatest heroes in commercial aviation history.
© Confessions of a Trolley Dolly
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