hong kong,afp-many people laugh at mobile phone and think they are a toy for the rich. but they can prove very useful to anyone in a serious situations-like a hijack or plane crash.
in japan recently, five of the hostages on the hijacked all nipon airways flight 857 managed to make calls from the plane using mobile telephones. after the successful raid on the plane, chief cabinet secretary kozo igarashi said the phone calls,made i secret from the aircraft's had helped. the authorities did not know at first whether or not the hijack
was alone. This made it difficult for prime minister murayama to give the go-ahead for the raid.
bout calls from several passengers unnoticed by the hijack helped the authorities to learn what was going on inside the plane, he said fukami,21,called home from a toilet to tell his family ha was all right. tatsuo yamamoto, head of an engineering company, called his travel to say that some passenger were blind folded and others had their hands tied. one passenger uesed his video camera to record scenes on board the hijack ed plane which were shown on tv after hostages' release.
there was another case last month in wich mobile phone saved lives. minutes after surviving a plane crash which killed three people, bill McGrory was on his mobile phone telling the operator to "get me everything." McGrory, a passenger on an aircraft which crashed in stormy weather in New Zealand, was the first to tell outsiders what happened. he first an emergency nimber, then phoned his wife to say he was all right.