Этот день я запомню, наверное, на всю жизнь. И самолет «ТУ-154», и свои ночные бдения в аэропорту «Внуково-1», и стюардессу Юлию Фомину… Но это в то же время была одна из немногих ситуаций, когда мне хотелось работать, потому что работа моя была кому-то нужна. Текст написан для курса о рисках.

I’ll remember this day, probably, for the whole my life. Both the plane "TU-154 ", and the night duty at the airport "Vnukovo-1", and stewardess Julia Fomina… But at the same time it was one of few situations when I did want to work because my work was necessary. The text was written for the Risk Reporting course.

by Alexander Smotrov
aleksmot@yandex.ru



It happened on Thursday, March 15, 2001. Even now I remember almost everything minute by minute… I was almost ready to go home that evening when one of my colleagues rushed into our door and told us that a Russian airplane had been hijacked in Turkey.

From this moment forward everybody in our desk became an entire team doing as much as we could at the moment. Some of us began to call to the Russian embassy and general consulate in Ankara and in Istanbul (because our news agency RIA “Novosti” has no correspondents in Turkey), somebody tried to find out details of the accident in the Russian Foreign Ministry, other people were told to watch TV and other news agencies’ reports.

Step by step we found out and immediately let our readers know that the airplane TU-154 owned by the Russian flight company “Vnukovo Airlines” flying from Turkey to Moscow with more than 160 people aboard had been hijacked in the air. Nobody could guess the aims and plans of the hijackers until the crew asked for landing in Egypt. After the Egyptian, and then Syrian authorities refused to give the green light for the plane, the pilots were forced to fly to Saudi Arabia, where the plane landed in the airport of Medina.

Such unexpected and unprecedented events always caused a kind of panic and chaos among journalists. What to do? What happened? Where to go? Whom to interview? But after some time, when the situation is more or less clear, sober and sensible decisions can be made.

One of them was to send somebody to the Vnukovo airport near Moscow, where the plane was supposed to land, and there were a lot of relatives and friends of the passengers there. The head office of the flight company “Vnukovo Airlines” was also located there. So, after Medina the airport was second major center of news coming from the plane.

The person who was chosen to be sent to the airport was me. When I arrived at the airport, there were a lot of Russian and foreign journalists there, but after some time the major part of them went away, because it was already midnight. The only media which stayed in the airport were two major TV-channels and our news agency. The information was very contradictory: for example, according to my sources in the airport, there were three terrorists aboard, but my urgent news item about it was followed in 6 minutes by another urgent message from another correspondent whose sources claimed that the number of terrorists is four.

We tried to cooperate with the TV-reporters. I could tell them the latest news from our agency and they could share with me the information they had succeeded to obtain. But I should only dictate the information to the main office unlike TV-reporters who needed to wait for exact time to be on the air with their latest news. I could only quote some officials and they had to ask him to tell these things in front of the camera.

At 2 a.m. we reported that there were no new demands from the terrorists and there was silence on the air during their walkie-talkie conversation with Saudi authorities. My boss told me that I could go home.

Later the plane was stormed by the Saudi security service, the people who were taken hostage and spent 20 hours in fear were released, all the passengers and the crew flew to Moscow. The accident costed three people their lives: a Russian stewardess, a Turkish passenger and one of the terrorists were killed during the storm…

But these events were covered by other journalists. I did my part of the job, I didn’t fail, and it was very good experience how to work in a non-standard situation, when you should be careful with your information not to do much harm people who are still involved in the situation like the hostages or the security servicemen whose task is to neutralize terrorists and save people’s lives.

Комментарии преподавателя/Teacher’s comments:

• Why was the information contradictory? Who was supplying the contradictory information?
• Why was there a difference in the information provided?
• Are you implying that your anonymity allowed you to gather more information? Make this clearer.
• That is a nice point to conclude on. Nice article.