In spite of man’s bungling nature, what can go right occasionally does so. The problem is that man typically draws the wrong lesson from when things go right. Long before 9/11, a group of highjackers almost succeeded in using a plane as a bomb. But because they were stopped, no one took the threat very seriously.

But if you read up on Air France Flight 8969, you realize how close it came to crashing into the Eiffel Tower. Or maybe how close the highjackers came to blowing up a plane over Paris. The information that is available to the public is not very clear on that point.

All that is known for sure is that Air France Flight 8969 was high jacked in Algeria in December of 1994 and the highjackers wanted to fly it to Paris. At a pit stop in Marseille the highjackers demanded 3 times as much fuel as was needed for the flight to Paris. And something convinced the French that they needed to storm the plane as soon as possible.

Why the French felt that they needed to storm the plane is not very clear. Some sources say that the French knew that the Highjackers intended to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower. Others only say that the French suspected that this was the Highjackers aim.

Regardless, this plan might have succeeded had the French government’s original plan been carried out.

In the beginning the French government did not seem to realize that this was a suicide mission. So they made a deal with the highjackers; in return for releasing the woman and children, the plane would be allowed to fly to Paris. But at first, Algerian government would not allow the plan to take off. It seems that this delay enabled French intelligence to overhear the highjackers talking about the best way to blow the plane up over Paris.

At that point everything got fouled up in bureaucratic infighting. The Algerian government and the French government both wanted to storm the plane. In fact, the Algerians had been against letting the plane takeoff from the very beginning.

But the French government did not want the Algerian commandos to storm the plane. Instead, they wanted their own Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (most commonly referred to by the acronym GIGN) to handle to problem. Naturally, Algerian government wanted its own commandos to do the storming since the plane was on Algerian soil.

After much French arm twisting, a compromise was reached. The Algerians let the plane take off, and the French tricked the highjackers into landing at Marseille on the excuse that the plane was low on fuel. There, the GIGN intended to storm the plane. But once again things started going wrong.

The Highjackers must have realized that something was up because they suddenly took the plane close to control tower and opened fire on it. This forced GIGN to charge the plane instead of sneaking up on it as they were intending to. If it had not been for their heavy body armor, the GIGN agents would have been massacred. As it was, they were initially driven back, and many of them were seriously injured. But they managed to keep the highjackers occupied while the passengers were evacuated.

After that, they just kept on shooting until all the highjackers were dead. They must have been shooting blind because the pilots who where cowering in the cockpit had to tell them to stop shooting when all the highjackers dead.

Watching the video below of GIGN storming the plane makes you realize how badly everything could have turned out. They were very fortunate.

(One annoying thing about the Video is that the narrator does not understand anything. For one thing, he keeps saying that GIGN was throwing explosives and he makes it sound like it was an explosive that ended the fight. In reality, only the highjackers threw a grenade which injured many people. GIGN was only throwing flash bangs as there were still pilots in the cockpit. The “explosive” that GIGN throws into the cockpit at the end of the video was flash bang. The GIGN guys were running because of the well aimed hostile fire. Once flash bang went off, they started advancing again. You can see a higher quality version of this same video here. Also this clip is longer but there is no sound.)