Attack Over Baghdad

A DHL cargo plane takes off from Baghdad Airport carrying three crew and thousands of letters from military personnel during the Iraqi war. The Iraqi Army, whom we have just liberated from the yoke of Saddam Hussein, were faced with improvised terrorist groups and fled, leaving their arms behind in multiple caches worth millions of dollars.

The terrorists now use one of the shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles on the DHL cargo plane. They are overjoyed when they're able to clip the trailing edge of the left wing just after take off. The wing stays on but some leaking fuel burns modestly. Worse, the airplane loses all its hydraulic fluid, which enables the pilot to manage the control surfaces.

With no hydraulics the airplane does whatever it wants to do, so to speak, and begins a series of sinoidal climbs and dives. The crew discover that they can roughly control the airplane using nothing but the thrust of the two engines. Under a pressure that can only be imagines, they are able to turn the airplane around and land it on the runway, although they run off the pavement and plow through the sand at the end, No one had ever safely landed an airplane with no hydraulics before. It's a magnificent feat of airmanship and the crew is properly rewarded.

Almost as interesting as the stricken airplane are the terrorists who shoot it down. The incident was filmed by two French journalists who though it was a bluff. The airport was occupied by what they considered enemy troops (American and Australian) but they had no idea who or what the target airplane was. It was an opportunistic shot. (They later fired a second missile and missed.) The terrorists boast about the hundreds of enemy they've killed. (They're lying.) What's required to solve this problem is not aviation experts but social scientists.