On 5 September 1986, a gang of terrorists took over a Pan Am jumbo jet at Karachi Airport, Pakistan. The flight crew escaped, leading to a siege. The leader of the gang shot a passenger and threw his body out to show they meant business. He ordered a flight attendant to collect the passengers' passports. She was sure he would kill an American, so she bravely concealed any American passports with western names and faces. Frustrated and angry, he picked a British passport, and the flight attendant announced "Will Michael John Thexton please come to the front of the plane?" A haggard man with straggly hair and a long beard went forward. A three-year old Indian girl asked her parents, "What happened to the hippy man?"
Mike Thexton was held at the front of the plane for twelve hours, waiting to be shot. When the ground power unit failed and the plane became dark, the terrorists put him back with the others, before opening fire indiscriminately. At least 20 people died and over a hundred were injured, but Mike escaped by jumping off the wing of the plane and running away, sure that he would wake up and find himself still kneeling by the front door.
This book tells the story of Mike's journey to Pakistan to say goodbye to his brother, who died in the Karakoram mountains in 1983 - his extraordinary bad and good luck on flight PA073 - the heroism of the flight attendants - and the long aftermath of one of the bloodiest terrrorist atrocities of the 1980s. After the leader of the gang was sentenced to 160 years in an American jail in 2004, Mike wrote a print book to tell the story up to that point. Since then the story has been retold in two documentaries - on Discovery and Sky - and in the Indian thriller "Neerja". Mike's part in the Sky documentary has finally given him the answer to a question that has puzzled him for thirty-five years: "Why didn't they shoot me?" The print book has been updated to complete the story, which comes full circle back to Mike's brother.