A German Lufthansa airliner that was infamously hijacked in 1977 has been moved into a new exhibition space on Tuesday, where it is slated to go on public display starting in 2026.
The fuselage of the ageing aircraft, named the Landshut after a German town, was pulled by a lorry from a hangar at the Friedrichshafen Airport in southern Germany to a nearby hall.
The aircraft was hijacked by militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on October 13, 1977 while flying from the Spanish island of Mallorca to Frankfurt.
The hijackers demanded the release of several imprisoned leaders of West Germany’s notorious left-wing Red Army Faction terrorist group.
The hijacking was a major event in the so-called German Autumn of 1977, when West Germany was rocked by a series of deadly Red Army Faction attacks, massive police operations to stop the group and the prison suicides of several RAF leaders.
The hijacked aircraft was flown to several locations. The flight’s captain, Jürgen Schumann, was fatally shot by a hijacker.
The aircraft eventually landed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, where German police commandos mounted a spectacular operation that managed to free the remaining hostages alive. The hijacking ordeal lasted five days.
The Landshut Boeing 737 aircraft, which had been in service since 1970, continued to fly for Lufthansa until 1985. It was then operated by various companies, most recently as a cargo aircraft, before being decommissioned in 2008.
In 2017, then-German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel had the aircraft brought from Brazil to Friedrichshafen, located on Lake Constance. The plane sat in a temporary warehouse at Friedrichshafen Airport for seven years.
“It was like a big puzzle to get all the pieces into the hall here,” said Steffen Krautzig from the project group leading the effort to display the aircraft.
Krautzig said that the hijacking and the successful operation to free the hostages was a defining moment in the history of West Germany.
The German government has set aside €15 million ($16 million) for the project.
