General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Dawson's Field hijackings

The Dawson's Field hijackings were a coordinated series of aircraft seizures carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in September 1970, in which four airliners were commandeered, two were forced to land at an abandoned Royal Air Force airstrip in the Jordanian desert, and more than 450 passengers and crew were held hostage for the release of Palestinian prisoners. The crisis precipitated Jordan's Black September civil war and drove the first systematic aviation security measures and international anti-hijacking conventions.

Key fact	Detail
Date	6 September 1970, with a fifth aircraft seized on 9 September¹
Perpetrator	Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)¹
Aircraft seized	Five planes attacked, four commandeered: TWA 741, Swissair 100, Pan Am 93, and on 9 September a BOAC VC10; the El Al hijacking attempt failed¹
Destination	Dawson's Field, a disused RAF airfield near Zarqa, Jordan; the Pan Am 747 was flown to Cairo because the strip could not take it²
Hostages	Approximately 450, including 58 West German citizens¹
Aircraft lost	Four, destroyed with explosives; no hostage lives were lost³
Aftermath	Black September civil war in Jordan; The Hague Convention signed in December 1970; mandatory screening and metal detectors introduced⁴^•²

The hijackings of 6 September

On the morning of 6 September 1970, teams of two PFLP hijackers armed with weapons boarded four commercial aircraft at European airports, all bound for New York City. A TWA flight from Frankfurt, a Swissair DC-8 flying from Zurich to New York, a Pan Am Boeing 747 that had departed Brussels, and an El Al 707 out of Tel Aviv were targeted in the coordinated operation⁵^•⁶.

The plan was to reroute all hijacked flights to Dawson's Field, a disused Royal Air Force airbase near Zarqa in Jordan. Two of the aircraft, the TWA 707 that had taken off from Frankfurt and the Swissair DC-8, were flown there and landed safely; a United States memorandum for the record of 6 September placed Dawson's Field 25 miles east of Zarka and reported both aircraft and their passengers safe, with Jordanian forces reinforcing a cordon around the area⁷. The hijackers announced that they would blow up themselves and the aircraft if any attempt was made to storm them⁷.

The Pan Am 747. Two men hijacked Pan Am Flight 93, a Boeing 747-121 on the Amsterdam to New York route, and diverted it first to Beirut International Airport, where seven other gang members boarded, and then to Cairo International Airport. The aircraft never reached Dawson's Field because the Jordanian airstrip was considered too small to accommodate a 747; on landing at Cairo the hijackers ordered the aircraft evacuated and destroyed it with explosives². According to the American Experience account, the plane exploded moments after flight director John Ferruggio evacuated the passengers and crew⁵.

The failed El Al seizure. The fourth attempt that Sunday failed. Two armed PFLP members tried to take control of an El Al 707 flying out of Tel Aviv; plainclothes El Al security guards shot and killed a male hijacker and wounded a female⁶. This was the second El Al attempt that year by the same pair: Palestinian Leila Khaled and Nicaraguan PFLP member Patrick Argüello had seized El Al Flight 219 just after it took off from Amsterdam, but passengers overpowered them and the plane diverted to London Heathrow, where Khaled was arrested and Argüello died of injuries sustained in the struggle¹.

The second aircraft and the hostage crisis

To increase its leverage with the British government, which was holding Khaled, the PFLP seized a fifth aircraft. On 9 September a BOAC Vickers VC10 with 155 passengers aboard, en route from Bombay to London, was commandeered shortly after takeoff from Bahrain and flown to Dawson's Field¹. With the BOAC jet on the ground, the PFLP controlled more than 450 hostages on Jordanian soil, including 58 West German citizens along with nationals of Switzerland, Britain, the United States, Israel, and other countries¹.

The PFLP demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held in several countries in return for the hostages⁸. On 6 September the group issued a 72-hour ultimatum to the Swiss government to release three Palestinian commandos then serving 12-year sentences in Switzerland for attacking an Israeli airliner in Zurich in 1969⁷.

The affected governments, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Israel, formed a coordination committee in Bern to negotiate the hostages' release and liaise with the Red Cross, which led negotiations with the hijackers in Jordan. Coordination proved cumbersome; states favored unilateral solutions to secure their own citizens, and the hijackers separated 56 men who were citizens of the Bern nations from the other hostages and dispersed them across Jordan, escalating the crisis for the European governments¹.

Black September

The PFLP had executed the hijackings on Jordanian soil in direct defiance of King Hussein's authority, and the event soon ignited a civil war in Jordan. Armed fedayeen factions acting as a state within a state had long threatened the stability of the Jordanian government, and on 16 September Hussein declared martial law and launched a full-scale military offensive against the PLO and PFLP infrastructure in the country, the conflict known as Black September¹^•⁴. According to the Blumenau study, it was the advance of Jordanian forces on PFLP strongholds, rather than bargaining with the terrorists or secret negotiations through Egypt, that secured the release of the remaining Western hostages within roughly three weeks¹. With the planes destroyed and the PLO's apparent failure to rein in the PFLP, the unified front in Bern fractured¹.

Consequences for aviation security and international law

The destruction of the aircraft on the ground, unprecedented in the scale of a single coordinated operation, changed how states treated hijacking. Lufthansa's insurance premium rose by 3400 percent in the aftermath, and airlines found it increasingly difficult to insure their aircraft¹. Governments introduced mandatory passenger screening, metal detectors, and air marshal programs; the United States and other Western nations put these measures in place following the events of September 1970⁴. In West Germany, checks were intensified and metal detectors installed, though Bonn decided against air marshals, judging the risks of in-flight combat too high¹.

The international legal response moved quickly. From 1 to 16 December 1970, 77 states and 12 international organizations met in The Hague and signed the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, which came into force on 14 October 1971; the Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation followed in September 1971 and entered into force on 26 January 1973². On 9 September 1970 the UN Security Council had already adopted Resolution 286, calling on states to take all possible legal steps to prevent further hijackings². Yet the crisis did not produce unified international action at the time: scholars have noted that it revealed the inadequacies of ad hoc multilateral responses, and terrorism was not officially placed on the UN agenda until the 1972 Munich Olympics attack¹.

Place in the history of air terrorism

The crisis marked a shift in terrorist hijackings from an issue primarily affecting Israel to one directly relevant to Western states, whose citizens were seized and whose governments' foreign policies the PFLP said it was targeting¹^•⁸. It foreshadowed later attacks on Western targets, including the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972 and the Entebbe hijacking of 1976¹. A study of the period concludes that today's airport security measures are rooted in the American response to the Dawson's Field hijackings, and the event is ranked with the September 11, 2001 attacks in its impact on aviation security⁹.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Conflict and security › Wars, campaigns, and incidents › Massacres, mass violence, and terrorist attacks › Terrorist attacks and mass-casualty incidents › Hostage sieges, hijackings, and captivity incidents

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 18, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 18, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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