✏️🛠️ You Can Still Report a Damn Good Story Even When None of Your Subjects Are Alive—Here's How

Seth Lorinczi wasn’t able to reach any of the players in his recent hijacking feature. He takes us through the steps he took to report the story anyway, offering advice on how you can do the same.

Illustration by Genevieve Ashley

I’m still not sure how it started. Maybe we were talking about our fathers; maybe it was our fascination with vintage jetliners. But when my friend Doug Hilsinger made an offhand comment about what his dad had done aboard an airliner over Ethiopia in 1972, I was hooked. 

“It was pretty wild,” Doug said. “Someone pulled the pin on a grenade, and my dad actually ended up kind of saving the plane.” 

That turned out to be an understatement. As Doug spun out the tale — a band of armed insurgents aboard a commercial jetliner and a pitched gun battle at 30,000 feet, his dad truly the hero at the center of it all — I knew I needed to write about it. Everything lined up: It was a thrilling story, no one had written about it in decades and I had access to scans of old newspaper articles about one of the story’s central figures. Piece of cake, right? 

I did end up writing about it, in a Deep Dive published last month called “Anatomy of an Absolutely Wild 1970s Hijacking You’ve Never Heard Of,” but no, not quite. For one thing, there was the challenge of finding still-living witnesses. Few, if any, of the people actually aboard the airplane that day were still alive. Professor Rod Hilsinger, Doug’s father, had died in 2000. His colleague and companion on the flight, Dr. Richard Wylie, had passed away in 2018. Even secondary sources, such as Betty Schantz, Professor Hilsinger’s wife at the time of the hijacking, were disappearing (I was dismayed to learn she’d died a year or so before I began my research). I did manage to speak with Hilsinger’s first wife, but in an eerie resonance, she passed away only a month or two after our conversation.

That left children and grandchildren. I had several conversations with Professor  Hilsinger’s four kids, including Doug, which helped fill in sensory details and backstory — the fact that the “priceless relics” bestowed upon Hilsinger by Emperor Haile Selassie as a reward for his heroic actions turned out to be cheap fakes stuck with me. But having all been children at the time of the incident, there were limits as to what they remembered or ever knew. 

On a personal note, I don’t think I’ll ever forget my conversation with Ann Searight, daughter of one of the elderly British birdwatchers cited in the piece. Now well into her 80s, Ann is witty and vivacious, speaking in a posh and arch idiom, right down to her rolled Rs. Having been an adult at the time of the hijacking, she was the one exception, providing small details like the ground crew’s shocked reaction once the plane landed. Once I’d exhausted these few living sources, though, it was time to pursue other avenues. 

This brings me to the first piece of advice, which is: Dig deep and reach out to every single person you can find who’s closely related to the subjects at hand. While they can — and probably will — offer recollections that have faded or become distorted over time, they’re more likely to provide granular (and unusual) details than the official sources. They might have leads on other potential sources, too. Then keep going.