Hijack 1971 is 2024 new South Korean crime thriller film that blends fact and fiction in equal measures, creating quite an entertaining and intense watch, although overly dramatized. The plot is centered around the first officer of a civilian aircraft, Tae-in, who has to rely on his extreme bravery and composure in a moment of great crisis as the airplane he is flying is hijacked by an armed passenger onboard. While Hijack 1971 does begin with a statement claiming that its plot is dramatized for a fictional retelling, the crux of it is very much factual and based on historical events from South Korea’s recent past. So, let’s breakdown the events of the film and find out what happened in Hijack 1971’s ending.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Despite the year mentioned in its title, Hijack 1971 begins in 1969, during a regular training mission of the South Korean air force. A senior officer pilot, Tae-in, flies around with a young trainee, Dong-cheol, both showing their skills to each other when they suddenly receive orders from the airbase. The two fighter jets are to fly to a certain set of coordinates immediately, for a rather bizarre situation is unfolding in the skies at the spot. As Tae-in and Dong-cheol reach the location, they see a commercial airplane dangerously heading straight out of the South Korean airspace, seemingly intended to cross over the border. Any such flight, filled with passengers and crew, headed to the rival country, North Korea, is nothing short of a disaster because of the hostile political situation between the neighboring nations. Confused by the commercial pilot’s strange move and unwilling to take any risks to escalate the political situation, the Air Force chief orders Tae-in and Dong-cheol to shoot down one of the two engines of the flight and ensure a crash landing before it crosses over the border.
But Tae-in refuses to carry out this order, for he sees an old acquaintance, Min-su, in the seat of the first officer on the passenger flight. Min-su had once been Tae-in’s superior in the Air Force, and so the latter is now even more confused about his intentions. Tae-in is almost sure that it is a hijacking situation but is unwilling to shoot at the flight’s engine, with the risk of a terrible fire breaking out and killing everyone onboard. Therefore, no bullets are fired by either of the fighter jets, and the commercial YS-11 airplane crosses over to North Korea and is lost track of immediately. It was only a few months later that North Korean authorities shared news about the 51 passengers and crew members, and eventually, they also promised to return the citizens to their original country after keeping them hostage as prisoners. As Tae-in is dismissed from the Air Force, he takes a professional break and visits Min-su’s wife and son before he is scheduled to be released.
However, on the day of the promised return, only 39 individuals are released by North Korea, while the remaining 11 (the last 1 being the hijacker himself) are kept in the country as political prisoners. The sole hijacker is supposedly paid a grand amount of money by the North Korean government in a political move to encourage more terrorist attacks in its neighboring country. Min-su’s name is also tarnished back in his village, as he is believed to be a Communist sympathizer. Some more difficult months passed by, and Tae-in was finally able to land a job as a passenger flight pilot for the Korea Air Lines company in 1971. Due to his comparative inexperience in the profession, Tae-in still serves as the first officer under the command of Captain Gyu-sik. As the civilian aircraft reaches the runway at the Sokcho airport, the crew takes a short break while passengers gather to board the flight and head towards Seoul. None of them have the faintest idea, though, that another hijack is in the works and that the next few hours are going to be the most difficult ones in their respective lives.
What is the reason behind the horrific hijacking?
When the Korea Air Lines flight takes off from Sokcho and flies its usual route towards the capital city of Seoul, many of the passengers in the cabin are still bickering about the seats they have gotten and other minor matters. One of the major problems, for example, is when an old woman is found to have boarded the plane with her pet hen, which the other passengers find simply bizarre and too dangerous. Unfortunately, they do not suspect that the young man sitting right beside the elderly lady is going to be a much bigger and more dangerous threat to their lives only a few minutes later. Hijack 1971 presents a set of characters through the introduction to the passengers on the flight, and some of them include a young couple going on their honeymoon, an ex-Korean police officer and his wife, and a rich, self-centered businessman and his obedient assistant. Inside the cockpit, Gyu-sik shows confidence in Tae-in and tells him to make his first landing on a passenger aircraft when the flight reaches Seoul.
However, the whole situation changes very quickly when a young man in shabby clothes, Yong-dae, suddenly steps up and pulls out two explosives from his jacket. The first is detonated inside the cabin, leading to a dangerous hole in the floor of the aircraft, while the other one is used to blow open the door to the cockpit. Within a short while, Yong-dae is able to take down the only male marshal in the cabin, tie him to a seat, and entirely take the plane hostage. His orders to the captain and his officer are very clear—the plane is to be flown towards the East Sea until the very end of the South Korean airspace is reached. Following this, the plane is then to be taken beyond the border and landed in North Korea, along with all its passengers and crew members. When asked about his intentions, Yong-dae clearly states that he is inspired by the events of 1969, particularly by the fact that the North Korean government had paid the hijacker a large amount of money, and had also given him the respect of a hero. This young man, as he himself states, is chasing the same feeling of glory and has, therefore, hijacked this passenger flight.
Despite his heinous acts, though, Yong-dae is not portrayed as a stereotypical villain in Hijack 1971, and a few flashback scenes also give a more detailed idea about the hijacker’s life and his decisions at present. When the landmass of Korea was first split by the USA and the Soviet Union during World War II, it was the common people who had to live with the sudden idea of two nations existing in place of one. After the war ended and the respective governments were formed in the two Koreas, there were naturally sympathizers of the other country, or of their way of life, in both the newly-formed nations. The biggest difference with regard to the politics of the two countries was that North Korea became a communist state, while South Korea adopted the values of free market and economy from the United States. Despite this divide, there were still communist sympathizers living in the South Korean territory, and they were openly considered a threat to the nation. While many years passed and the two Koreas even fought a war against each other, this resentment towards communists remained in South Korea. Incidentally, in late 1966, a brief three-year conflict also started between the two countries, informally called the Second Korean War, when North Korea started sending guerilla fighters to the South.
Throughout the 1960s, tensions were very high in South Korea, as it was feared that a sudden attack might be launched by the North Koreans with the help of conspirators south of the border. Villages near the border were searched carefully for intruders, and the home of Yong-dae happened to be in such a region. Incidentally, Yong-dae’s elder brother had been openly sympathetic towards communism and the government in North Korea before eventually crossing the border and leaving his home and family in South Korea forever. Therefore, the soldiers who conducted the regular searches of homes were extra cautious about Yong-dae’s family since one of them had already defected. However, the soldiers were also terribly harsh and brutal during these searches, and they never cared to understand why the families living in unbearable poverty in the South Korean nation might think that the grass was greener on the other side. In some scenarios, they would falsely accuse poor citizens of treason only to beat them up or loot their homes, and something similar happened to Yong-dae as well.
The young man and his mother were used to mistreatment and slander, both by the soldiers and by their neighbors, for being the family members of a communist defector. However, during one search of their home, a soldier planted some communist pamphlets inside Yong-dae’s dairy to trap him, and despite all his protests, both verbal and then physical, the man was dragged to prison. While Yong-dae spent a couple of years in prison, his elderly mother could not make ends meet and died of extreme hunger and poverty. When Yong-dae was finally released from prison, and returned home, the man was shocked to find his mother’s corpse lying unattended, with maggots crawling all over it. This shock and grief affected his psyche forever, and around this same time, in 1969, he learned of the YS-11 hijacking from news TV programs. His decision to hijack the Korean Air Lines plane in 1971 was not really because of the money he would receive from the North Korean government but rather out of a desperate yearning for acceptance and also out of a feeling of vengeance against the South Korean military, who had wronged him and his mother.
Why does Tae-in try to protect Yong-dae?
Throughout the most tense parts of Hijack 1971, Tae-in shows supreme courage in trying to not only protect the passengers on the plane but also to provide counsel to Yong-dae. In this sense, Tae-in is really the first and only person to try to understand Yong-dae’s difficulties in life and the extreme bitterness that he is driven by. In doing so, Tae-in is indeed able to halt Yong-dae in his tracks a number of times, especially towards the end, because of which the flight marshal can take over the situation and shoot the hijacker. Firstly, Tae-in showing some indirect sympathy towards the young man greatly helps the situation as hostility would not have worked against him and would have just escalated the situation further. However, Tae-in does seem to want to help Yong-dae in some situations, and this is because, in a way, he can indeed relate to the hijacker.
Two years earlier, when Tae-in had refused to shoot down the YS-11 aircraft, he too had been branded a traitor and too sensitive by his own countrymen. His superior at the time had reminded Tae-in that his ‘humanist’ decision to prioritize the lives of the passengers more than the honour of the South Korean nation would have dire consequences not just for him and his family but also for the family members of the kidnapped passengers. This turned out to be true, as the family members of both Tae-in and the pilot of the YS-11 aircraft, Min-su, had been called traitors and enemies of the government by their own countrymen. Nobody bothered to understand the terribly dangerous and stressful situations the two men had been in, because of which they had taken their respective decisions. Therefore, Tae-in does know the feeling of being hated and, in a sense, being wronged by his own government, just like Yong-dae, and the two men are really the closest to each other in this respect. However, unlike Yong-dae, Tae-in still had one strong support in his life, his beloved wife Moon-young, so he did not go completely rogue in life like the hijacker.
During Hijack 1971’s ending, Tae-in heroically throws himself onto an exploding bomb, only to protect the others in the flight from it, and is terribly injured by it. Even in this state, he is able to crash-land the plane on a beach on the South Korean side of the border, while Yong-dae is shot dead by the air marshal. Despite this grand success in ensuring that all the passengers and crew members on the plane survived the incident, Tae-in himself cannot make it and ultimately succumbs to blood loss and injuries.
Is the film based on true events?
Despite the unbelievably intense plot of Hijack 1971, it is indeed based on true events from history, although the names of the characters have been changed for obvious reasons. The political tension between North and South Korea had reached its peak in the 1960s, especially in 1969, when a defector hijacked a Korean Air Lines flight and forced it to fly over the border. This hijacker was indeed hailed as a hero in North Korea, as shown in the film, and only 39 of the 51 individuals on the plane were allowed to return to their country. The remaining 11, including the first officer, who has been named Min-su in the film, were kept as prisoners or workers in North Korea, and no further information about them has been found to this day. All these 11 individuals had specialized skills and knowledge in various fields, and this is why the North Korean government refused to let them leave, forcing them to work for the development of the nation instead.
Inspired by this hijacking of the Korean Air Lines YS-11 flight, a young man named Kim Sang-tae hijacked a Korean Air Lines F27 passenger flight in 1971 with hand grenades and pipe bombs. He threatened to blow up the plane unless it was flown over to North Korea by Captain Lee Kang-heun and his first officer, Park Wan-gyu. Despite the demands of the hijacker, though, the pilots managed to crash-land the plane on Chodo Beach in the Kosung area of South Korea. The only two fatalities of the incident were Sang-tae, who had been shot dead, and Wan-gyu, who had thrown himself at the bomb to protect others. But unlike in the film, it was the head captain, Kang-heun, who managed to land the plane on the beach despite being heavily injured, while Wan-gyu had probably died earlier. Thus, although layers of fictional drama have been created over the main incidents, the crux of Hijack 1971 is the very true heroics of two pilots who managed to save 58 passengers from mortal and political danger.