Like its title, “Hijack” gets to the point and zeroes in on the business at hand. Which doesn’t mean this British limited series is, well, limited in scope.

The airplane hijacking thriller neatly unwraps a labyrinthine mystery, smoothly toggles from the most personal experiences to the highest levels of government and international involvement, and flies all over two continents without ever losing its way.

Creator George Kay’s (“Lupin”) claim that the story is told in “real time,” a la the old “24” series, is a bit deceptive. With slick precision, scenes jump among dozens of characters and locations, which enables stretching time for maximum dramatic impact.

But so what? The conceit that each of the show’s seven episodes — the first two of which premiere on Apple TV+ Wednesday, June 28 — unfolds during one hour of a Dubai-to-London passenger jet’s flight does wonders for building suspense and generating cliffhangers. We get a new skyjacking show every few years (“7500” was a pandemic streaming staple); “Hijack” doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it’s an expert example of how to make it feel fresh and palpable.

Casting Idris Elba as the point-of-view passenger was a superb decision. Hardly an everyman, his Sam Nelson is a corporate deal closer with the subtle skills of reading and convincing people to do what he wants. That doesn’t mean he’s some Svengali, though; he gets flummoxed by changing circumstances and new information like anyone else. Sam just manages to keep his head when five other fliers pull out guns shortly after Kingdom Airlines Flight 29 leaves the Emirates.

Elba’s magnetic rock of a screen presence helps Sam appear to know more than he does when negotiating with the head air pirate, a volatile English bloke named Stuart (Neil Maskell, star of the great “Kill List”) whose heart isn’t 100% into his terrorizing ways. Sam also endeavors to keep his 200-odd fellow hostages calm while plotting with some of them to turn the tables on their captors — or maybe just save his own butt. “The Wire” star Elba keeps the talkative guy’s motives just murky enough to make him interesting.

Back home in London, Sam’s physics professor ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams, “Black Lightning”) has had it with his manipulative ways and is sleeping with a Scotland Yard detective, Daniel O’Farrell (Mac Beesley, “Empire”). When Sam manages to get a cryptic message to Marsha before everyone’s phones are confiscated, she blows it off. Fortunately, suspicious cop Dan doesn’t, and the apparently irresistible fellow contacts a former girlfriend, British counterterrorism officer Zahra Gahfoor (Archie Panjabi of “The Good Wife”).

There are apt Schrödinger’s cat references as we follow the procedural steps from “the pilot said it was a false alarm” to tragic discoveries on the ground in Dubai to high U.K. government officials debating and making agonizing decisions. Meanwhile, as Flight 29 enters various nations’ airspaces, NATO fighters scramble and SWAT teams swarm landing strips. Bodies drop inside the cabin, too, and it’s no safer in Great Britain.

For all of its well-ratcheted hysteria (and, when all is revealed, somewhat ridiculous plot), “Hijack” sports a stiff-upper-lip English attitude that somehow makes it more nerve-racking. There’s a matter-of-fact sensibleness to the narrative’s multipronged drive; very little feels extraneous, and most of what happens seems plausible in the moment.

Moral and emotional implications are drawn efficiently, as are most characters, if only a handful of them to an extent you could call three-dimensional. Besides Elba’s iron anchor of a performance, Eve Myles (“Torchwood,” “Broadchurch”) deserves the Victoria Cross for her air traffic controller Alice Sinclair. A Midlands single mum who kind of hates her job, Alice, assigned Flight 29, won’t let anything (including Sam’s gift of gab, once contact is re-established) deflect her bulldog determination to get the right things done.

“This is very quickly becoming not good,” Alice plainly remarks when she realizes what’s going on in the air and headed her way. Probably the best TV understatement of the year, though definitely not a reflection of “Hijack’s” quality. The only reason not to watch this show is an inordinate attachment to one’s fingernails.

鲍勃·施特劳斯自由writer.