‘Hijack’ Ends Not with a Whimper but with a Bang — Here’s How They Created That Tense Landing

[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for “Hijack.”]

After seven tense hours, Kingdom Airlines Flight 29 arrived at its final destination in London intact, despite a hijacking, the murders of a passenger, a hijacker, and the pilot, and a second hijacking. (It was a long flight.) And though “Hijack” production designer Andrew Purcell cannily crafted a plane on which to film the Idris Elba–led Apple TV+ series, some things can’t be faked. Including a forced landing fraught with “Will they make it?” tension. (Watch the gripping landing in the video below.)

“This is the only real plane involved in the making of it,” Purcell told IndieWire of the landing (watch it in the video below). “Up in Gloucestershire, there’s a kind of airplane graveyard where they strip down planes [to] get everything of value off there. There is an amazing amount of value in a scrapped aircraft. [We used] an A330, which was perfect in every way other than it was missing its engines and it was two-tone. So we had to paint it and physically graphic it [with the Kingdom Airlines’ logo].”

The painting of an aircraft is no small task (nor is it an inexpensive one), and Purcell managed to persuade producers to only film one side of the plane before hiring aeronautical painters for the job.

But because Flight 29 doesn’t quite manage a smooth landing, the plane required a little staging. “It is not a crash landing; it’s a difficult landing,” Purcell noted, “so we winched it up, and then we took 40 tons of aeroplane and craned it onto its nose. Just having the nose gear go was enough to create enough tension and drama and around the landing.” 

As with most of “Hijack,” the crash site was done largely with practical effects. And that meant finding engines to use as props (as one might expect, the engines of airplanes are worth a pretty penny, and so the plane salvaged for the landing lacked them). “That kind of worked for us in terms of this forced landing, that the engines get ripped off,” Purcell said. “But then we needed them as evidence there on the ground. So we had to find some engines that we could rent to dress. Which we did. So that was another part of the journey: A couple of engines were loaded onto a transporter and brought up for us just to as dressing.”

With the plane in place, Purcell and his team set to work creating a debris field, painting a skidmark onto the runway and strewing suitcases, secondhand landing gear, and various smoking rubble around the plane. And then came renting firetrucks and ambulances for the final crash site touch — aided greatly by a rainstorm the night before filming.

And as filming began, the productions drew plenty of onlookers. “A lot of airplane spotters come up to this airport because it’s a practical airport,” Purcell said. “But they also come up to see all the old aircraft in the sort of graveyard. But of course, as soon as the word went round that there was this plane on its nose, we got a lot of interest!”

All episodes of “Hijack” are streaming on Apple TV+.