Two flight attendants received medals for their bravery (Image: CBC)
“A few days ago all of us passengers, pilots and flight attendants aboard Flight 918 had to live through our worst nightmare,” Captain James Murphy shared.
And once the painful details of his horrific ordeal emerge, most will find it difficult to disagree with his assessment.
The year was 2009, the flight was CanJet Flight 918, the aircraft was a Boeing 737-800 manufactured in 2000. Yet on this occasion, it was neither a fatal plane crash nor a collision on the runway that people were talking about – it was an eight-hour kidnapping carried out by a lone armed gunman.
Following the nightmarish incident, the remarkable courage of the entire crew was recognized by the Canadian Prime Minister, with the two flight attendants receiving awards for their extraordinary bravery.
On April 19, 2009, CanJet Flight 918 was scheduled to depart from Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica, destined for Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Halifax, Canada, according to reports. Mirror US
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CanJet Flight 918 was hijacked for eight hours by a lone gunman in Jamaica (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
what happened on that terrible day
The aircraft was carrying 159 passengers and 8 crew members (some reports put the number of passengers at 174), all Canadians, and was scheduled to depart from Sangster International Airport at 11:00 pm.
The crew on board the flight were Captain James T. Murphy, First Officer Glenn Johnson, Lead Flight Attendant Heidi Tofflemire, Flight Attendants Nicole Louise Foran, Carolina Sanitzo Arriola, Tony Bettencourt, Anu Goswami, and Security Officer Joseph Mark Gary Nickel. By 10:30 pm, the flight was boarded by Stephen Frey, a 21-year-old man from Montego Bay who called himself ‘Rico’.
Stephen was tall, wearing a shirt, shorts and shoes, and as it turned out, he was the son of a prosperous Jamaican businessman. However, what set him apart was the fact that he had a gun.
While boarding a flight to Canada, Stephen had a licensed .38 Smith & Wesson revolver (which actually belonged to his father) and wanted to take it to Cuba, so he could go there.
Flight attendant Carolina remembers turning the corner into the plane’s galley and smiling innocently at the hijacker, who had a gun held to the captain’s neck. The kidnapper smiled in response.
Then the nightmare began.
flight crew courage
Stephan held at least six of the eight crew members of Flight 918 hostage for more than eight hours, and he would have done the same to the passengers had it not been for the remarkable bravery of flight attendant Carolina, who managed to convince the gunman to release the passengers.
He achieved this over the course of about an hour, sometimes with the gun aimed directly at his head as the kidnapper’s primary hostage.
Carolina talks with Stefan, later described as “mentally deranged”, and convinces him to let the travelers go.
The entire flight crew remained composed and steadfast, with Carolina and Nicole working tirelessly to negotiate with the hijacker to free the people without harm. Nicole reportedly attempted to gather all the children on board and lead them to the back of the plane in hopes of ensuring their safety, while maintaining a reassuring smile on her face.
easy flight According to reports, a gun was held to Carolina’s head while attempting to negotiate with the deranged hijacker, who reportedly burned one of the flight attendants with a fire extinguisher.
In addition, he also demanded alcohol and the playing of Celine Dion’s music, and attempted to incapacitate male passengers by forcing them to consume drugs found on board, in order to neutralize any physical threat to himself. The Globe and Mail.
The hostages were ordered to remain in their seats as the gunman aggressively brandished his firearm, his temperament swinging between agitated and calm – at one moment hammering on the cockpit door and demanding to be “taken to America”, and at another moment, showing Nicole and Carolina photos of his girlfriend.
Flight attendant Nicole Foran snatches gun from deranged hijacker (Image: Handout)
The courageous flight attendants engaged the unstable gunman the entire time, attempting to keep him calm and prevent the situation from worsening.
Eventually, the hijacker was persuaded – under the guise of arranging fuel for the plane’s departure, the captain as well as all the passengers would be released unharmed.
However, he first had to surrender all his money and personal property on board the ship. Passengers were instructed to place any cash they carried in a plastic bag, which was collected by flight attendant Nicole. Many of them reportedly cried as they departed, and made emotional apologies to the crew members who were on the plane with the gunman.
Carolina received the Medal of Bravery, Canada’s third highest civilian honor for courage, for “acts of bravery under hazardous circumstances”.
In a rare interview with National Post Jo O’Connor’s flight attendant Nicole Foran said in 2013: “It’s not easy to talk about. It was a terrible night.”
Nicole was awarded the Star of Courage, an honor even rarer than the Medal of Valor, and to achieve it she was forced to face her worst nightmare.
She told the publication: “You go quiet and your survival instincts kick in, and my thought was – how do we get all these people off the plane – and how do we survive this?”
In an effort to defuse the potentially fatal situation, Nicole recalled how the flight attendant had talked to the hijacker about Canada, its breathtaking beauty and its bitter winters. He also talked to them about his work. She said: “We just talked to distract him from things.”
However, his composed appearance was entirely an act, as throughout the entire ordeal he was constantly considering how to escape the situation, what objects he could use to distract the kidnapper, or overpower him, so that the nightmare could end.
Nicole remembers seeing the military and police stationed outside the plane, wondering if they would attack the plane. After eight hours the excruciating ordeal finally came to an end. Jamaican military commandos had stormed the plane, and that moment of paranoia was exactly what Nicole had expected.
“The gun was on me. So I reached out and pushed his hands towards him and took the gun out of his hand. I just took the gun from him.
Nicole shared, “You see his body language, and he looked stunned, and I thought I hadn’t been shot for eight hours and I wasn’t going to get shot myself — so I took the gun.”
Injecting some humor into the circumstances, the courageous flight attendant told the National Post that her family and friends “laughed when I told them, because they couldn’t believe it”. The reason? “Because I’m a little person.”
Yet there was nothing small about the actions of Nicole, Carolina, the remaining flight crew or the passengers on that fateful day in April 2009, and their bravery will not be forgotten anytime soon.
Stephen Frey was sentenced to 20 years in prison for kidnapping.
