The One Who Stayed

The big jet stood on the tarmac at Karachi airport in the early morning. Passengers were still taking their seats. The flight had come from Bombay, and would go on to Frankfurt and New York.

Then a van drove up to the plane. Four men jumped out, dressed like airport security guards. They carried guns. They ran up the steps and into the aircraft.

It was 5 September 1986. On board Pan Am Flight 73 were nearly four hundred people, passengers and crew. And the woman in charge of the cabin crew was twenty-two years old.

A girl from Bombay

Her name was Neerja Bhanot. She was born in Chandigarh in 1963 and grew up in Bombay, where her father was a journalist. She was cheerful and warm, loved films and music, and had worked as a model in advertisements.

An unhappy early marriage had ended, and she had come home to her parents. She then trained as a flight attendant with Pan Am, the American airline, and in a short time rose to become a senior purser, the leader of the cabin crew on her flights.

The first warning

When the gunmen burst in, Neerja acted fast. She sent the agreed hijacking signal to the cockpit.

Because of her warning, the three pilots in the cockpit were able to escape through a hatch in the roof. Without them, the plane could not take off. The hijackers had wanted to force it to fly to another country. Now it was stuck on the ground.

The hijackers belonged to a militant group. They demanded a new crew to fly the plane. Hours passed while officials on the ground talked to them. Early on, they shot a young passenger and pushed him out of the door, to show they were serious.

The passports

The hijackers ordered the cabin crew to collect everyone's passports. They wanted to find the Americans on board.

Neerja and the other attendants went from row to row, gathering the passports. But they quietly hid many of them, especially the American ones, under seats and down a rubbish chute, so that the hijackers could not pick out those passengers.

Through the long, hot day the crew kept working. They gave out food and water. They calmed frightened passengers, including many families with small children. They did their job as if it were a normal flight, though it was anything but.

The lights go out

The standoff lasted around sixteen hours. As evening turned to night, the plane's power began to fail. The lights dimmed, and then went out.

In the darkness, the hijackers panicked. They began shooting into the crowded cabin and set off explosives.

In the chaos, Neerja opened an emergency door. The escape slide unrolled, and she began helping passengers out into the night. She could have gone down the slide herself, and been safe. She did not. She stayed, helping people out.

According to accounts of survivors, she was shielding three children from the gunfire when she was shot.

Most of the people on board escaped. But around twenty lost their lives that night. Neerja was one of them. Her twenty-third birthday would have been two days later.

Remembered

The hijackers were captured and later sent to prison.

India awarded Neerja the Ashoka Chakra, its highest award for courage in peacetime. She was the youngest person ever to receive it. Pakistan and the United States also honoured her. Many years later, in 2004, India issued a postage stamp in her memory.

Her family used the insurance money and their own savings to set up a trust in her name. Every year it gives the Neerja Bhanot Award to women who have shown courage in the face of injustice, often women who have stood up to cruelty at home, as she once did.

In 2016, a Hindi film called Neerja told her story to a new generation. Many people who watched it had been born long after that night in Karachi.

They learned what the passengers had learned. When it mattered most, the young woman in charge did not leave.

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The Indian government's Gallantry Awards website records her Ashoka Chakra. Newspapers in India and around the world reported the hijacking in detail in September 1986, and the 2016 film Neerja is based on her life.