The Cathay Pacific crew held hostage by gunmen in Istanbul told yesterday how they used tact and humour to get through their tense and frightening ordeal.
The two pilots and 11 flight attendants, believed to be Hong Kong's first airline crew involved in an overseas hostage crisis, were reunited with their families after arriving at Chek Lap Kok yesterday morning.
The crew, staying in Istanbul during a flight stopover, were among 120 people held for 12 hours by pro-Chechen gunmen in the Swissotel before being released on Monday afternoon.
Pilot Ashley Frost, one of the first Cathay employees to be confronted by the armed gunmen on Sunday night, took the lead in giving an account of the drama at a briefing organised by Cathay.
'We had a bang on the door at 12.30am in my corridor. I was called out of the room by hotel staff to be confronted by a man with a shotgun. I asked him, 'Am I being robbed here?' And I was told, 'No, this is much more political than that'.'
He said he and a female flight attendant were taken to the lobby on the ninth floor of the hotel, where they were held hostage with more than 100 other guests.
They put their training in dealing with hijack situations to use, he said. 'We positioned ourselves as safely as possible behind larger objects which would give us the best cover. In a stressful situation like this, quite a lot of people used humour to diffuse it and it was unusual . . . but the crew coped very well,' he said.