This flight crashed near the south-east coast of Africa (very close to Comoros Islands) during a hijacking when it ran out of fuel.

I faintly remember hearing of this crash when I was in JS1. Years later, I watched a Discovery Channel documentary about the flight. What I remember most about the documentary was
- A husband and wife both survived the crash.
- The hijackers had no real plan. They seemed to be on a suicide mission.
- Many people died because they didn’t follow the pilot’s instructions to not open their lifejackets while in the plane.

Today, I saw it on Wikipedia front page and read more about it. Several Nigerians died in that flight, and some also survived.

I’m glad that hijacking is now almost unheard of in modern flights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

Aircraft
The aircraft involved in the accident was a Boeing 767-260ER, registration ET-AIZ, c/n 23916, that had its maiden flight on 17 September 1987. Powered by two Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7R4E engines, it was delivered new to Ethiopian Airlines on 22 October 1987. Except for a short period between May 1991and February 1992 when it was leased to Air Tanzania, the airplane spent its life in the Ethiopian Airlines fleet. It was 9 years old at the time the incident took place.
Captain Leul Abate (42), an experienced pilot with over 11,500 total flight hours, was the pilot-in-command. The first officer on the flight was Yonas Mekuria (34). He had flown more than 6,500 hours.
The flight had been delayed in order to allow a connecting flight to feed passengers. The aircraft took off at 08:09 UTC.

Hijacking
At about 08:29 UTC, when the aircraft, referred to as Zulu by Ethiopian Airlines' pilots, after the last letter of its registration, was still flying over Ethiopian airspace, three Ethiopian men charged the cockpit and hijacked the aircraft after taking an axe and a fire extinguisher from the cockpit. According to a special Airdisaster.com report, "One of the men ran down the aisle toward the cockpit, shouting statements that could not be understood, and his two accomplices followed soon after." The Airdisaster report described the men as "young (mid-twenties), inexperienced, psychologically fragile, and intoxicated." Ethiopian state-operated radio later identified the hijackers as two unemployed high-school graduates and a nurse; their names were Alemayehu Bekeli Belayneh, Mathias Solomon Belay, and Sultan Ali Hussein (they did not say who had which description).
The men threatened to blow the plane up in flight if the pilots did not obey their demands. The hijackers said that there were eleven of them when in fact there were only three. After assaulting and forcing Yonas into the cabin, they made an announcement. Over the intercom, they declared in Amharic, French and English that if anyone tried to interfere, they had a bomb and they would use it to blow up the plane. Authorities later determined that the purported bomb was actually a covered bottle of liquor.
The hijackers demanded the plane be flown to Australia. Leul tried to explain they had only taken on the fuel needed for the scheduled flight and thus could not even make a quarter of the journey, but the hijackers did not believe him. They had been reading the Selamta in-flight magazine stating that the maximum flying time of the airplane was 11 hours.
Instead of flying towards Australia, the captain followed the African coastline. The hijackers noticed that land was still visible and forced the pilot to steer east. Leul secretly headed for the Comoro Islands, which lie midway between Madagascar and the African mainland.[11]

Crash landing
Sequence showing the ditching of the aircraft; this was recorded by a South African tourist.
The plane was nearly out of fuel as it approached the island group, but the hijackers continued to ignore the captain's warnings. Out of options, Leul began to circle the area, hoping to land the plane at the Comoros' main airport. This forced Leul to land at more than 175 knots (324 km/h; 201 mph).
Leul tried to make an emergency landing at Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport on Grande Comore, but a fight with the hijackers at the last minute caused him to lose his visual point of reference, leaving him unable to locate the airport. While still fighting with the hijackers, he tried to ditch the aircraft in shallow waters 500 yards (457 m) off Le Galawa Beach Hotel, near Mitsamiouli at the northern end of Grande Comore island. Leul attempted to land parallel with the waves instead of against the waves in an effort to smooth the landing. Seconds prior to contacting the water the aircraft was banked left some ten degrees; the left engine and wingtip struck the water first. The engine acted as a scoop and struck a coral reef, slowing that side of the aircraft quickly and causing the Boeing 767 to suddenly tilt left. The rest of the aircraft then entered the water unevenly, causing it to break apart. Except for the rear part of the airframe, the broken portions of the fuselage sank rapidly. Many passengers died because they inflated their life jackets in the cabin, causing them to be trapped inside by the rising water.
Island residents and tourists, including a group of scuba divers and some French doctors on vacation, came to the aid of crash survivors. A tourist recorded a video of ET-AIZ crashing. She said that she had begun taping because she initially believed that the 767 formed a part of an air show for tourists.

RIP to the deceased victims.