Capt. Adamos Marneros gazed with foreboding at the dots on the radar screen of his passenger jet as it prepared for landing on Cyprus.

It was before dawn on July 20, 1974, and the view of from his cockpit confirmed his suspicions: Turkish warships were approaching the Mediterranean island in an invasion triggered by a coup by Greek Cypriots aiming to unite with Greece.

“I couldn’t allow myself to be frightened because I would be unable to do my job and land the plane safely,” Marneros told The Associated Press.

Marneros was then a 27-year-old pilot with national carrier Cyprus Airways who had received his captain’s stripes only two months earlier, the first Cypriot to win the post in the company’s history.

Flight 317, taking off from London Heathrow with a brief stopover in Rome, would go down as the last to land at the country’s transportation jewel, Nicosia airport, before it was shut down barely six years after its completion. The invasion that Marneros witnessed from the skies cleaved the island in two along ethnic lines with breakaway Turkish Cypriots in the north and internationally recognized Greek Cypriots in the south.

Once an emblem of the young republic’s growing confidence just 14 years after independence from British colonial rule, the airport overnight became a symbol of a future hijacked by unresolved conflict.

Aboard the aircraft were only 10 passengers made up of two families — a Greek one and a Turkish Cypriot one.

Marneros says he had deep misgivings about making the flight to Nicosia. After a sleepless night in his London hotel room watching TV reports of the buildup to invasion, he pleaded on three separate occasions with the airline’s boss to cancel the flight. The reply was unequivocal every time: You must bring the aircraft back to Nicosia.
Associated Press