Two East Germans force a Polish airliner to land at Tegel

On 19 October 1969 LOT flight 247 from Warsaw via Berlin to Brussels, a four-engined Ilyushin 18 with 63 passengers and nine crew, was on its approach to East Berlin's Schönefeld airport when it climbed away again, flew a wide loop and landed at 13.55 at Tegel airfield in West Berlin. According to Der Spiegel, two East Germans, aged 19 and 24, had got into the cockpit unnoticed by the passengers, knocked down the flight engineer and forced the pilots to divert to Tegel with old revolvers that were possibly not loaded. Two Soviet fighters tried in vain to stop the landing in the West.

When the cabin door opened, two young men told the Tegel ground staff: 'Wir sind geflitzt' ('we've bolted'). French troops, who controlled the airfield, surrounded the aircraft, took the two into custody and held them at their headquarters, the Quartier Napoléon; the two had asked for political asylum at once. The flight engineer left the plane with a head wound. After about three hours the Ilyushin took off again for Schönefeld with the other passengers and crew. Der Spiegel called it the first escape of this kind by East Germans.

A week later Der Spiegel named the two as the vehicle fitter Peter Klemt and his fellow mechanic Ulrich-Jürgen von Hof, 19. Klemt had already fled once: on 3 February 1964, aged 19, he swam from east to west through the Teltow Canal, but in March 1964 he went back to East Berlin by S-Bahn. The French military authorities kept both hijackers in custody and intended to try them before a French court in Berlin; a spokesman of the French administration said a Polish extradition request was 'not under discussion at all', and Der Spiegel wrote that both would be allowed to stay in the West.