The Travel Detective
Travel Detective Blog: How My Luggage Was Hijacked With TWA Flight 847
Image Credit: Steve Peters
Image Credit: Steve Peters
Thirty years ago this week, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked on a flight from Athens to Rome, and I was a very small and indirect part of that story back in 1985.
Two days before the terrorist incident, I was flying from Los Angeles to Athens via London on British Airways to join a cruise ship in Piraeus, Greece. But when I landed in Athens, I discovered that British Airways had lost my two bags. They were gone, without a trace. Because the ship was departing later that afternoon, I had no choice but to leave with the ship.
The next day, as we steamed toward Italy, the cruise ship received a telex from British Airways that they had found one of my bags, and they were putting it on the next available flight from Athens to Rome. The bag would be waiting for me when the ship pulled in to Civitavecchia, the port city of Rome.
But, as I would later learn, the next available flight from Athens to Rome was TWA Flight 847.
The plane, with 139 passengers on board (and my lost suitcase in the cargo hold) embarked at 10:10 the morning of June 14 for a flight that never made it to Rome. It was hijacked and landed first in Beirut, then Algeria, back to Beirut, then back to Algiers, and finally, back to Beirut.
Needless to say, my bag never arrived that day in Italy. In fact, it never arrived at all.
In those days, a bag on a hijacked plane landing in Beirut with “Greenberg” marked on the luggage tag was never coming back!
But what about the second bag? The cruise ended with no word of the missing suitcase. Then, as I transited through London, British Airways sent another telex. The bag was found. For reasons that no one ever explained, it had shown up in Stockton, California. So, I asked for the bag to be sent back to my home in California and I would personally retrieve it the next day at the Burbank Airport.
When I arrived to collect the bag, I also left empty-handed. The counter agent for Pacific Southwest Airlines, the now defunct California carrier, sheepishly told me that PSA had lost the bag somewhere between northern and southern California. Yes, you guessed it, that bag never came back either. My lost luggage was just a small footnote in the incredible story of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847.
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By Peter Greenberg for PeterGreenberg.com
