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
Three-letter acronym Three-letter acronym A three-letter acronym (TLA), or three-letter abbreviation, is an abbreviation, specifically an acronym, alphabetism, or initialism, consisting of three letters. These are usually the initial letters of the words of the phrase abbreviated, and are written in capital letters (upper case); three-letter abbreviations such as "etc." and "Mrs." are not three-letter acronyms, but "TLA" is a TLA (an example of an autological abbreviation). Most three-letter abbreviations are "initialisms": all the letters are pronounced as the names of letters, as in "APA" . Some are acronyms pronounced as a word; computed axial tomography, CAT, is almost always pronounced as