Hours after four airliners were hijacked on September 11, 2001, a Korean Air Boeing 747 inadvertently convinced authorities that it might be a fifth. Fighter jets were scrambled, cities were evacuated, and two governments prepared for the possibility that the aircraft would have to be shot down.
By the time it approached North America, the World Trade Center had collapsed, the Pentagon had been struck, United Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania, and every aircraft still in the sky was being viewed through a very different lens.
The Korean Air crew was communicating with its operations center about the attacks when the captain included the letters “HJK” in an ACARS message. HJK was shorthand for hijacking.
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