On the morning of September 6, 1970, four teams of operatives from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine boarded commercial airliners in Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Brussels. By nightfall, three hijacked aircraft sat in the Jordanian desert at a disused Royal Air Force airstrip called Dawson’s Field. The PFLP renamed it Revolution Airport. Within three weeks, the hostage crisis that unfolded there would help trigger a civil war, reshape the geopolitics of the Middle East, and mark the arrival of international terrorism as a permanent feature of the modern world.
It remains one of the most audacious operations in the history of political violence. And in my novel The Isdal Woman, a young woman named Amira finds herself at the center of it.
The Plan
The architect of the operation was Wadie Haddad, head of the PFLP’s external operations wing. Haddad was a physician by training and a revolutionary by conviction — a man who believed that spectacular acts of violence were the only language the West would understand. He had been planning a coordinated mass hijacking since at least the spring of 1970, and by June the operation had taken its final shape.
Three flights would be seized simultaneously on September 6: TWA Flight 741 departing Frankfurt, Swissair Flight 100 departing Zurich, and El Al Flight 219 departing Amsterdam. The Frankfurt and Zurich operations were strategically chosen — they would create diplomatic leverage to free PFLP members imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland after earlier attacks. All three aircraft would be diverted to Dawson’s Field, a flat stretch of cracked tarmac in the desert outside Zarqa, Jordan. There the passengers would be held until the PFLP’s demands were met.
The timing was not accidental. In the summer of 1970, U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers was brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Egypt. The PFLP, which opposed any diplomatic recognition of Israel, viewed the Rogers Plan as an existential threat — a path toward normalized relations that would leave Palestinians permanently dispossessed. The hijackings were designed to shatter that diplomacy, to make the Palestinian cause impossible to ignore, and to demonstrate that no Western citizen was safe so long as the Palestinian question remained unresolved.
The plan was breathtaking in its ambition and terrifying in its simplicity. No government had ever faced anything like it. No security apparatus was prepared. And for a few surreal days in September, a patch of Jordanian desert became the most important piece of real estate on Earth.
September 6: Chaos in the Sky
The hijackings began in quick succession. Shortly after noon, two PFLP operatives armed with pistols and grenades seized TWA Flight 741, a Boeing 707 carrying 155 passengers and crew. A woman’s voice came over the intercom with chilling calm: “I am the new pilot who has taken command of your TWA flight. Keep calm. Please cooperate and put your hands behind your head.” The aircraft was diverted south and east toward Jordan.
Minutes later, over France, a man and woman produced a silver revolver aboard Swissair Flight 100, a Douglas DC-8 carrying 157 passengers and crew en route from Zurich to New York. The plane was turned toward the same coordinates.
The El Al operation, however, went catastrophically wrong. Israeli intelligence had been tracking PFLP activity for months. When operatives Patrick Argüello and Leila Khaled made their move aboard Flight 219, the pilot threw the Boeing 707 into a violent nosedive, hurling both hijackers off balance. Argüello’s grenade failed to detonate. He was struck over the head with a whiskey bottle by a passenger, then shot by an Israeli sky marshal. Khaled was subdued and the plane made an emergency landing at London Heathrow, where she was arrested by British police. Argüello died in the ambulance.
Two PFLP operatives who had been pulled from the El Al flight during security screening pivoted to a backup plan. They boarded Pan Am Flight 93, a massive Boeing 747 — the first jumbo jet ever hijacked. But the plane was too large for Dawson’s Field’s short runway. It was diverted first to Beirut, where more PFLP operatives boarded with enough explosives to destroy the aircraft, and then to Cairo. Passengers scrambled down emergency slides moments before the 747 erupted in a fireball on the tarmac, the first hull loss of the iconic aircraft. Egyptian police arrested the hijackers on the spot.
By 6:55 p.m. local time, both the TWA and Swissair flights had landed at Dawson’s Field. Three hundred and ten hostages sat in two aluminum tubes in the desert heat, surrounded by armed guerrillas and, soon enough, by Jordanian army tanks.
Revolution Airport was open for business.
The Standoff
For six days, the desert airstrip became a stage for one of the most extraordinary hostage dramas in history. On September 7, the PFLP invited sixty journalists to Revolution Airport for a press conference — a calculated spectacle designed to ensure that the world was watching. It worked. The images beamed from Dawson’s Field — hijacked airliners baking in the desert sun, armed guerrillas patrolling between them, passengers visible through oval windows — were unlike anything television audiences had ever seen.
The PFLP’s demands were sweeping: the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, Switzerland, West Germany, and Britain, including Leila Khaled. Governments scrambled. The Nixon administration debated military options. President Nixon reportedly ordered the Pentagon to bomb the airstrip; Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, opposed to any military action, claimed the weather was unfavorable. He would later admit this was a deliberate excuse.
On September 9, three days into the standoff, the PFLP escalated. A fifth aircraft — BOAC Flight 775, a Vickers VC-10 carrying 115 passengers and crew from Bombay to London — was hijacked after departing Bahrain and diverted to Dawson’s Field. The arrival of a third aircraft tightened the noose. The PFLP now held over four hundred hostages.
Inside the planes, conditions deteriorated rapidly. Temperatures soared during the day and plummeted at night. Water and food were rationed. Sanitation was primitive. The hostages endured the particular psychological torment of uncertainty — not knowing whether they would be released, rescued, or killed. Jewish passengers and citizens of countries holding PFLP prisoners were separated from the others and held under tighter guard. Some were moved to secret locations in Amman as insurance against an Israeli rescue operation.
On September 12, the PFLP released most of the hostages, evacuating them to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. Then, with the cameras still rolling, they detonated the three empty aircraft. The explosions sent pillars of black smoke into the desert sky — a spectacular act of destruction designed to demonstrate that the PFLP could seize and destroy Western property at will. The footage was broadcast worldwide. It remains some of the most striking imagery of the twentieth century.
But fifty-six hostages were not released. They were retained as bargaining chips — American, Israeli, Swiss, West German, and British citizens whose governments had not yet agreed to prisoner exchanges. These hostages would endure two more weeks of captivity as the situation around them spiraled into something far worse than a hijacking.
Black September
What the PFLP had not fully anticipated — or perhaps had not cared to prevent — was the response of Jordan’s King Hussein. The Palestinian armed factions, particularly the PFLP and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, had been operating as a virtual state-within-a-state in Jordan for years. The Dawson’s Field hijackings were the final provocation.
On September 17, Hussein unleashed the Jordanian army against the Palestinian guerrillas. What followed was a brutal ten-day military campaign that Palestinians would come to call Black September. Artillery pounded refugee camps. Street fighting raged through Amman. Thousands of Palestinians — fighters and civilians alike — were killed. The PLO and its constituent factions were driven from Jordan entirely, eventually relocating to Lebanon, where they would plant the seeds of yet another civil war.
For the hostages still held in Amman, the civil war was a nightmare layered on top of a nightmare. Mortar shells fell near the Intercontinental Hotel. Gunfire crackled through the streets at all hours. The freed passengers who had been transferred to the hotel found themselves caught in a crossfire between the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas.
The last hostages were finally released on September 30, 1970, in exchange for Leila Khaled and six PFLP members held in European prisons, including three operatives convicted for a 1969 attack on an Israeli El Al flight at Zurich’s Kloten airport. None of the passengers or crew had been killed during the hijackings themselves — a fact that the PFLP considered a point of discipline and restraint, though the terror inflicted on hundreds of innocent people was incalculable.
After the Flames
The Dawson’s Field hijackings lasted twenty-five days. They produced no Palestinian state. They freed a handful of prisoners. They triggered a civil war that killed thousands of the very people the PFLP claimed to represent. And they demonstrated, with terrible clarity, that a small group of determined individuals could hold the attention of the entire world by threatening innocent lives.
The reverberations are still with us. Aviation security as we know it — the metal detectors, the screenings, the fortified cockpit doors — traces a direct line back to that desert airstrip in September 1970. Scholars of terrorism have identified the Dawson’s Field hijackings as the moment when political violence became a media strategy, when the spectacular act itself became the message.
Revolution Airport was operational for less than a month. The planes were reduced to scorched wreckage. The desert reclaimed the tarmac. But the world that existed before September 6, 1970, never came back.
