On 13 October 1977, Lufthansa flight 181, a Boeing 737-230 named Landshut, was hijacked shortly after leaving Palma de Mallorca for Frankfurt. Four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took the aircraft, acting in coordination with the Red Army Faction, which was then holding the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. Their demand was the release of RAF prisoners held in West Germany.
Five days across three continents
The aircraft was flown from Palma to Rome, then Larnaca, then Bahrain, Dubai, Aden and finally Mogadishu in Somalia — refused landing at several airports along the way, running low on fuel and supplies, with 86 passengers and five crew aboard in worsening conditions.
At Aden, the hijackers' leader murdered Captain Jürgen Schumann, who had been outside the aircraft inspecting the landing gear and was accused of communicating with authorities. First Officer Jürgen Vietor flew the remaining leg to Mogadishu alone.
The assault
West Germany deployed GSG 9, a federal police counter-terrorism unit created after the failure of the response to the 1972 Munich Olympics attack. Two British SAS advisers accompanied them, bringing stun grenades that the German unit did not have.
In the early hours of 18 October, the assault went in. Somali forces lit a diversionary fire in front of the aircraft, drawing the hijackers to the cockpit. GSG 9 operators blew the doors and entered from the wings and rear. The operation took about seven minutes. Three hijackers were killed and one wounded and captured. All 86 hostages survived; one flight attendant was injured.
What followed in Germany
News of the rescue reached Stammheim prison the same night. Three imprisoned RAF leaders died there in what was ruled suicide. Schleyer was murdered by his captors the following day. The events are collectively remembered in Germany as the German Autumn.
Why it changed hostage rescue
Mogadishu is one of the founding operations of modern aircraft hostage rescue, alongside the Israeli raid at Entebbe the previous year. It established several things that became doctrine.
A dedicated, permanently trained unit is required — improvised responses fail, as Munich had shown. Assault must be simultaneous from multiple points to prevent hijackers from reacting. Diversion at the moment of entry buys the seconds that decide the outcome. And states must be able to operate abroad in cooperation with a host government at short notice.
The success also hardened the political position of several European governments against negotiating with hijackers, which changed the calculation for future attempts.
The Landshut itself flew on for decades, was eventually abandoned in Brazil, and was recovered and brought back to Germany in 2017 as a memorial.