Yuji Nishizawa boarded All Nippon Airways Flight 61 in Tokyo wearing a suit and carrying a knife. Shortly after the Boeing 747-400 reached cruising altitude, he forced his way into the cockpit. He held the blade to Captain Naoyuki Nagashima’s throat and demanded to be taken to the U.S. Yokota Air Base. The plane, with 503 passengers and 14 crew, began a slow turn. Nagashima feigned compliance.
He then told the hijacker he needed to consult his approach charts, which were stored in a compartment above and behind the pilot’s seat. As Nishizawa glanced up, Nagashima grabbed a two-liter plastic bottle of sake, a souvenir gift from a passenger. He swung it with full force against the hijacker’s head. The bottle did not break. Nishizawa stumbled. The co-pilot and a flight engineer then wrestled him to the cockpit floor and restrained him with neckties. The entire confrontation lasted less than ten minutes. The plane landed safely at Haneda Airport, where police arrested a dazed Nishizawa.
The incident led to the immediate installation of reinforced cockpit doors on Japanese commercial aircraft, a security measure the global industry would adopt universally after September 11, 2001. It entered airline security lore not for its scale or tragedy, but for its bizarre resolution. The official report dryly noted the effective, improvised use of a "hard object." The hijacking failed because of a pilot’s quick thinking and a bottle of undrinkably ceremonial rice wine.