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 codes were originally based on a two-letter-system and were identical to the airline codes used by IATA. After an airline joined IATA its existing ICAO-two-letter-code was taken over as IATA code. Because both organizations used the same code system, the current terms ICAO code and IATA code did not exist until the 1980s. They were commonly called two-letter-airline-designators. At this time it was impossible to find out whether an airline was an IATA member or not just by looking at its code. In the 1970s the abbreviation "BA" was the ICAO code and the IATA code of British Airways while