Comment by alexpotato
3 days ago
Reminds me of the story about Aeroflot (Soviet National airline) and hijackings
- Aeroflot flights get hijacked and flown to West Berlin
- Soviets decided to put Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) on the planes much like we have Air Marshals today
- Spetsnaz figures "we have guns and are on the plane already" so they start hijacking flights
- So Soviets put TWO Spetsnaz teams on the flight
- Team 1 decides to hijack flight, realize there is a Team 2 who ALSO agrees to hijack the flight
Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:
"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."
But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:
"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978) A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."
Are you an AI?
I once called my Dad out about Chinese nationalists setting bombs on ships in the 60s. He reckoned his ship had come to the rescue of one where they'd found a bomb and the command crew had posed with it for a photo and it had gone off, killing or wounding all the crew capable of actually navigating the ship.
No mention on Wikipedia of these terrorist activities, nothing in the history I could find online. He was a bit of a tall tale teller so I called him out on it.
He was quite upset and ended up showing me his ship log book. With the ship name and the rough date, I actually found two news articles that had been scanned by Google scholar conforming that it had really happened.
I bet there's a lot we don't know that happened behind the iron curtain, I wouldn't doubt this just because you can't easily find any references with a quick Google.
If you want the rest of how they saved the ship, they tried to get a junior officer over in a sort of swing. If they'd have succeeded they'd have actually all been entitled to a salvage payment. But it was too rough so in the end they just got the other ship to follow them back to port.
When the pilot came out to dock the ship, he found another bomb.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1734&dat=19661114&id=F...
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?
The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095415
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So pandaman is good and mattmanser is part of the same AI slop disinformation campaign as alexpotato. Got it.