LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 hijacking the Republic"), a crime under GDR law. Ruske and Tiede then concluded that they were trapped and that prison awaited them if they returned to East Germany. So they developed a plan to hijack a plane headed for East Berlin's Schönefeld Airport and force a landing at the U.S. Air Force base at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin. They bought a toy starting pistol at a Polish flea market, and then booked three tickets on LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 from Gdańsk, Poland, to East Berlin. On 30 August 1978, Tiede and Ruske hijacked a Polish LOT Tupolev Tu-134 airliner
Airline codes has been in place for 20 years. The codes issued to date comply with IATA Resolution 762, which provides for only two characters. These codes thus comply with the current airline designator standard, but use only a limited subset of its possible range. There are three types of designator: unique, numeric/alpha and controlled duplicate. IATA airline designators are used to identify an airline for commercial purposes in reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air waybills and in telecommunications. A flight designator is the concatenation of the airline designator, xx(a), and the numeric flight number, n(n)(n)(n), plus an optional one-letter "operational suffix" (a).