Canjet Flight 918

On a tarmac in Jamaica, an armed man takes a plane’s crew and 159 passengers hostage. Now it’s up to a pair of young flight attendants to save them all.

- Nicholas Hune-Brown

ON THE NIGHT of Sunday, April 19, 2009, Sangster International Airport was quiet. The flow of vacationers that pass through the busy portal to Jamaica’s north coast had slowed to a trickle as passengers boarded the final flight out of Montego Bay.

CanJet flight 918 was a double-stop flight from Halifax, taking on and letting off passengers in Jamaica before continuing to Cuba, then heading back to Nova Scotia, where the now-defunct low-cost charter airline was based. Just after 10 p.m., as the last few passengers snaked toward the screening area, a lanky figure appeared among the tourists. Handsome and young, wearing shorts and loafers, the man looked like any other well-to-do Jamaican. When security guards asked him to walk through the metal detector, however, he refused. He hitched up his shirt to reveal a gleam of silver, then pulled out a .38 revolver and sprinted toward the gate where the Boeing 737 sat waiting.

Onboard, eight crew members and 159 unsuspecting passengers were already seated when the gunman entered. The pilot, Captain James Murphy, came out of the cockpit to investigate, and flight attendant Heidi Tofflemire and co-pilot Glenn Johnson locked the door behind him, sealing off the flight deck. When the man announced that he needed to leave Jamaica that night, Murphy lied and said the plane still needed to be refuelled. That’s when the hijacker placed the gun’s muzzle against the pilot’s throat. “I am God,” he said. “I like to take lives.”