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Chapter 24
Skyjacking

Civilization is a delicate web held together by mutual consent. The jet airliner is modern civilization’s most prominent symbol of that mutual consent, the embodiment of man’s conquest of the skies, and the promise that someday technology will serve only mankind’s peaceful in­stincts. Graceful and powerful, the jet airliner is also delicate and vulnerable.

To a certain extent, civilization has always been vulnerable to criminals, psychotics, fanatics, and misfits. Armed with bomb and gun, the few who would make war on the many have always been able to hold society hos­tage temporarily. By striking at the vulnerable interstices where mutual consent and common respect govern decent intercourse, Jesse James distorted the society of frontier Missouri by robbing its unguarded banks and trains. So also would the skyjackers be able to distort commercial aviation, ironically linking Jesse James’s heroic status with the admiration many people felt for skyjackers.

Just after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, most skyjackers were peo­ple fleeing communist tyranny and hence “freedom fighters” to many Americans. For Capt. J.J. O’Donnell, who stepped from the command of an Eastern Air Lines (EAL) DC-9 to the helm of ALPA in the midst of a sickening international wave of aerial piracy in 1971, the crusade against skyjacking would be an all-consuming passion. Nearly everything ALPA did between 1970 and 1974 would necessarily take a backseat to the elimination of skyjacking. Like his predecessor, Charley Ruby, J.J. O’Donnell would face his share of intractable issues and impossible situations, but none would rival skyjacking in intensity. He would find that hard problems make for difficult solutions.

The early history of skyjacking bears some comparison to that of the safety issue. Put simply, safety is so expensive that both management and government have skimped on it because of their principal concern for profits. Historically, some of ALPA’s toughest fights were with the compa­nies and the government over the proper balance between safety and economy. In a sense, this scenario would repeat itself in skyjacking, with ALPA urging a no-holds-barred, full-forward approach and the govern­ment and the airlines always seeking the least costly solution.

By 1970, professional airline pilots the world over were infuriated at the penny-wise niggling that had characterized the response of governments and airlines to skyjacking. With an epidemic of political and economic ter­rorism abroad in the world, capped by the simultaneous skyjacking of four airliners on a single day by Arab terrorists in September 1970, the profes­sional airline pilots of the world, speaking through the International Fed­eration of Air Line Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA), would demand strong ac­tion to curb aerial piracy. Pilots couldn’t understand why governments and airlines were so reluctant to move against skyjacking.

The lead editorial in the New York Times on Sept. 14, 1970, explained this reluctance by pointing out that “concern for profit” was preventing the airlines from taking the kinds of measures that would prevent skyjacking. Although Charles Tillinghast of Trans World Airlines (TWA) disputed the Times editorial, most informed observers knew better. Jack Bavis, who flew for EAL before coming aboard ALPA as J.J. O’Donnell’s executive administrator in 1971, bore personal responsibility for overseeing ALPA’s antiskyjacking program in the early 1970s. As an ex-Massachusetts state policeman, Bavis brought special expertise to the EAL flight security program. O’Donnell tapped him to integrate the EAL program into a national one. Immediately, Bavis discovered that “economic reality” stood athwart ALPA’s effort to eliminate skyjacking:

Reason and logic weren’t going to work, simply because of the cost of an effective security system. President O’Donnell took over at a time when emotions had reached a high point among the pilot groups, and a lot of people who wanted action were blaming Char­ley Ruby for not getting it. After I got here I discovered the handi­caps he was working under. What Charley had was himself, virtu­ally no help from anybody else, because he was so busy fending off internal attacks. J.J. was free, temporarily at least, from that kind of attack, so he could spend his time on the basic problem, which was money. We not only had to apply unremitting pressure, but we also had to come up with a source of funds to pay for the ground secu­rity system. Eventually we persuaded the government to tap ADAP [Airport Development Aid Program] funds.

Expensive ground security (long backed by ALPA) to prevent skyjackers from boarding was the only answer that ever made any sense. Effective ground security systems were practical and available as early as 1963, but not until tragedy and the unrelenting pressure from ALPA forced the hand of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and management did these systems begin to come into widespread use after 1973. It is one of history’s supreme ironies that public apathy underlay this government and management reluctance to stand tough against skyjacking. The combined efforts of ALPA and IFALPA to create effective ground security systems would suffer, partly because the public didn’t want to be inconvenienced.

Although aviation has seen random skyjacking before, the modern his­tory of the subject begins in 1959, the year Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. When anti-Castro Cubans began commandeering airliners to flee their homeland, most Americans heartily approved! After all, Castro was a Communist, and people fleeing his tyranny seemed to deserve sympathy. Although most professional airline pilots, regardless of their nationality, saw the dangers of skyjacking immediately, the public was having too much fun sharing a horselaugh at Castro’s expense to worry about the long-range implications of skyjacking—or about the possibility of this virus spreading.

It never seemed to occur to the average American that applauding an es­cape to freedom accomplished with a pistol at the head of an airline pilot, albeit a Cuban Communist one, was not the wisest precedent for the na­tion with the world’s most extensive air transportation system. All through the 1960s, as Castro consolidated his power, Cuban opponents of his re­gime continued to flee in everything from leaky sailboats to oversize inner tubes. Their flight became more desperate as Castro’s firing squads began eliminating officials of the Batista regime. Needless to say, a man who ex­pects to be lined up against a wall and shot will not trouble himself over the legal niceties of his departure—if a pistol must be his passport, then so be it. And anyway, for most Americans, skyjacking was something that hap­pened only in Communist countries.

Then in May 1961, the tables were turned. A man describing himself as pro-Castro skyjacked a National Airlines (NAL) Convair 440. The skyjacker was armed with a knife and a pistol, so Capt. Francis Riley was in no mood to argue with him. En route to Havana, the skyjacker ranted about warning Fidel of an assassination plot. Riley later described the skyjacker as a “psychopath.” After landing safely at Havana, the crew and 17 passengers were allowed to depart. The skyjacker was never seen again.

It was the first skyjacking to Cuba—it would not be the last.

On July 24, 1961, barely three months later, an EAL Electra with 38 passengers aboard was diverted to Havana. Castro promptly released the crew and passengers, but he kept the plane as a pawn in his game to have the United States return the motley collection of fishing boats, airplanes, and even naval vessels that had been hijacked to the mainland. Castro declared that he would release the Electra as soon as the United States agreed to open formal discussions about putting a halt to skyjacking. He also wanted an agreement to return hijackers to the flight’s country of origin to face prosecution. The U.S. government balked. No politician in his right mind, given the public’s antipathy toward Castro, dared return an anticommunist “freedom fighter” to Cuba. Nor were we about to return any of the hijacked vehicles to Castro, largely owing to legal claims filed against them by indi­viduals seeking redress for property lost in Cuba because of the revolu­tion. (We did, however, return Castro’s naval vessel.)

After two weeks, Castro relented and the EAL Electra was released. His­torical irony again—Castro made the first overture to end skyjacking, but we rebuffed him. And there the matter rested, with the news media tend­ing to portray those who escaped from Cuba as heroes. This glorification was bound to have an influence, and the idea of skyjacking, once im­planted in an unstable mind, was bound to have consequences. It would cost Capt. Oscar Cleal his eyes, his career, and very nearly his life.

On July 31, 1961, Oscar Cleal was doing what he liked best, flying his Pa­cific Air Lines (later Hughes Airwest) DC-3 over the company’s intrastate route in California. At Chico, Calif., that day, Oscar Cleal made what would prove to be his last landing as an airline captain with a certain nostalgia. He was scheduled to return to the Martin 404 soon, so he expected to be flying again, but not in the trusty old DC-3. Cleal and First Officer Al Wheeler chugged up to the ramp and shut down, anticipating a delay owing to a late arriving passenger. (Things were pretty casual on an intrastate carrier op­erating out of quiet, small-town airports in those days.) Cleal and Wheeler relaxed in the cockpit, idly discussing the weather at their next stop.

As they waited, Cleal and Wheeler heard a commotion, first in the bag­gage compartment and then in the cabin. “I thought it was a drunk,” Cleal remembers, “but [the noise] could have been a shot.” Cleal looked out the window and saw station agent Bill Hicks dragging himself away from the airplane, holding his side. Then there was a pounding on the cockpit door. Cleal and Wheeler added up the odd circumstances and surmised that a skyjacking was under way.

Seizing a wrench for added fist weight, Cleal rose from the left seat to do battle. Then he heard a pistol shot and a voice saying, “Get this plane going or I’ll shoot everybody.”

The flimsy cockpit door was bulging as the gunman frantically tried to burst in. Cleal positioned himself behind the left seat in an alcove used to hang coats. The instant the gunman crashed in, Cleal intended to brain him with the wrench. But mindful of the hazard facing the passengers, Cleal or­dered Wheeler to start the right engine and taxi away from the terminal, thus humoring the skyjacker temporarily. Wheeler complied, but the DC-3 wouldn’t budge—the parking brakes were set and could only be released from the left seat. Cleal left his ambush and jumped into the left seat to re­lease the brakes. At just that instant the door latch gave way and Cleal found himself staring straight into the barrel of a pistol.

The skyjacker was an unemployed, homesick hillbilly who wanted to go back to Smackover, Ark. The only problem was, he was broke. But he did own a pistol, and the Cuban skyjackers had given him an idea. Why not flee California, the hated land of city dudes and strange ways, by pointing the gun at an airline pilot? Once home, the skyjacker would simply disappear into the hills, perhaps to be regarded as a hero by the home folk. Such were the thought processes of this deluded individual.

“I never had any intention of leaving the ground,” Cleal says. “The only thing in my mind was somehow to get the drop on the guy and disarm him.” Using the ruse that he needed a chart from his nav kit, Cleal contrived to maneuver into a position where he could grab the gun. But when Cleal made his move, the pistol went off, and “a sea of black ink” closed over his eyes. First Officer Al Wheeler, a husky ex-policeman, jumped the skyjacker grappling with him over the gun as the taxiing DC-3 careened about the airport apron. “The last thing I recall was pushing on the brakes and pull­ing back the throttles,” Cleal says. “Then I lost consciousness.”

The skyjacker fired five shots in all before Wheeler knocked the gun from his hands. He then produced a knife, obliging Wheeler to fight on with him as Wheeler tried to control the taxiing aircraft. Finally, three pas­sengers rushed forward to help Wheeler subdue the skyjacker. The sky­jacking was over, but for Oscar Cleal the struggle was just beginning:

When I came to in the ambulance Bill Hicks said, “Well, we made it so far.” It took me an awful long time to realize that I’d never be back flying again, the thing I loved more than anything. I’ve thought over the things that contributed to the skyjacking. I think one of them was that the station agent had very little assistance. It was too much for one man to handle, and due to the economy of the feeder-line business at that time, well, they took advantage of these young guys to do all these jobs. When Bill Hicks was loading cargo, the skyjacker came on the airplane. When Hicks asked him to get out, he pulled the gun and shot him. There was a city-employed armed guard, carrying a 45 on his hip, and Hicks dragged himself into the airport, right by this guard who did abso­lutely nothing! The thing I would like to stress was that my first consideration was for the safety of the passengers, so I turned to this guy who had the .38 at my head, and I said, “Where do you want to go?” And he said, “Arkansas.” I said, “We’re not going anywhere unless I have a chart.” I pointed to my nav kit, ostensibly with the thought that if I could reach down under that gun to my chart and come up fast, I would be able to grab that gun. But when I started to come up, he shot me. I just wasn’t fast enough.

There are an awful lot of attitudes as to how one should deal with this. Some captains don’t want to mess around with a gun at all. Some people say we ought to be able to collar the guys our­selves. Others say, “I don’t care where they want to go; we’ll take them there.” But I have to hand it to El Al; they really have the an­swer as far as I’m concerned. I think the captain should have at least a .38 in his possession, though I’m not saying he should wear it on his hip. I feel the flight crews should be trained in karate or judo to disarm any drunk, psycho, or skyjacker. I got a few of the pilots there at Pacific Air Lines to go through this training. If I had had this training, maybe I wouldn’t have fumbled when I tried to disarm the skyjacker.

If the story of the tragedy that befell Oscar Cleal has anything like a happy ending, it is that he battled back against the darkness to become a successful stockbroker. He had been working on the Pacific Air Lines retirement committee, so as soon as his health permitted, Cleal began studying. With the help of his nurses and wife, who read aloud to him, and Recordings for the Blind, which transcribed textbooks he needed, Cleal passed the necessary examinations. Later, Cleal got hired by Shearson, working there for 13 years specializing in retirement and pension plans. Currently, he is with Kidder, Peabody & Company. “I didn’t want to live off my friendships,” Oscar Cleal says simply. “After 19 years of working in this business, I guess I made the right decision. But the brokerage business will never take the place of airline flying. It was a great fraternity.”

ALPA President Clancy Sayen, spurred by the tragedy that befell Oscar Cleal, issued steady warnings about the vulnerability of the air transporta­tion system. Using his influence with the Democratic administration, Sayen was instrumental in persuading John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for special antiskyjacking legislation. In 1961, a potpourri of federal and state laws impinged in some way on the problem, and this diversity of statutes was itself a source of encouragement to potential skyjackers. For example, although the skyjacker who ended Oscar Cleal’s career got the stiffest sentence possible under existing law, he was a free man after a mere 15 years. “The SOB who stole 19 good years of flying from me is now out walking around,” Oscar Cleal says simply, with understandable rancor.

From 1961 on, ALPA’s primary goal was to make sure not only that skyjackers would pay heavily for their crime, but also that air piracy itself would be as difficult as possible. And here chance intervened, for in 1961 the skyjacking binge suddenly abated and the public lost interest. Con­gress was reluctant to take expensive corrective action, so it failed to man­date the necessary security measures. Thus, the skyjacking issue merged neatly with the safety issue, which always had a dollar sign attached to it.

Getting a law passed providing stiff penalties for convicted skyjackers was relatively easy. Under ALPA’s prodding, Congress passed and President Kennedy signed, in record time, a new “air piracy” act. Although stiff penalties and a tough law on the books looked good, neither took any courage to pass because there was no price tag attached. FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby imposed some middling precautionary measures in August 1961 (mainly requiring locked and bolted cockpit doors), but the Air Transport Association (ATA) opposed more stringent measures. Halaby, always sensi­tive to the economic health of the carriers, demurred from stiffer prevention.

With ALPA’s help, Congressman Frank Leslie Chelf introduced an amend­ment to the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 that would have tightened screening procedures to prevent people carrying concealed weapons from boarding as passengers. Again, ATA opposed any kind of passenger screening or search. “I, for one, was tremendously disturbed by the ATA opposition to the Chelf bill,” says Oscar Cleal.

By 1962, when Charley Ruby took over as ALPA president, it was obvious that the FAA was going to bow to ATA’s opposition to tougher screening of boarding passengers. “We beat our brains out for years on this cockpit se­curity thing,” says Charley Ruby, “but we were getting nowhere; we were still vulnerable because it seemed as if everybody was pretending that what happened once couldn’t happen again.”

But it did, and ironically on Oscar Cleal’s own airline—Pacific. On May 7, 1964, in a chilling preview of the violence to come, another deranged indi­vidual shot his way into the cockpit, killing Capt. Ernie A. Clark and First Officer Ray E. Andress. The skyjacker’s object apparently was suicide. All 44 persons aboard the aircraft died in the crash. The FBI later traced a re­volver found in the wreckage to a man who had just bought a $60,000 policy at an airport insurance kiosk. For years ALPA had been agitating against these “instant insurance” policies, but since somebody stood to make money from them they stayed in airport lobbies, a permanent temp­tation to the deranged.

At this point, professional airline pilots began to arm themselves. In August 1961, just after Oscar Cleal’s wounding, ALPA officially came out against armed guards aboard aircraft to prevent skyjacking. If firearms were going to be aboard, most pilots preferred to use them themselves, but ALPA continued to support rigid preboarding passenger searches as the best alternative.

Charley Ruby has vivid memories of the problems ALPA encountered as a lone voice seeking effective remedies to the skyjacking problem:

I spent an awful lot of time trying to talk people into doing the things that were possible to do, and I must say that when it came to doing something effective, ALPA was not only the prime mover, we were almost the only mover. The first solution to the problem just added to it potentially; that was the sky marshal idea. It was per­fectly clear to everybody that the minute you have somebody with a gun who is not under the captain’s direct control you’ve got a high element of risk. Even with the use of low-velocity bullets there’s always a chance of somebody shooting out a windshield, pieces flying back in both pilots’ faces. We had to fight like hell for the most basic changes in ground screening, X-ray surveillance of luggage, magnetometers. It was obvious that the companies and the FAA were going to do as little as possible, and we finally had to threaten to take action on our own, and if it meant defying the gov­ernment ban on flight crews carrying handguns, well, we just had no choice, because we just couldn’t tolerate it any longer. I had to fight four-fifths of the airlines on the use of low-pulse X-rays, which were just beginning to show up to screen luggage. FAA was dubious about it, and of course Ralph Nader and his ilk screamed. The companies and the FAA finally gave in after an awful lot of pres­sure on my part, and they only did it because I threatened to go public with it and say that ALPA has a method of dealing with this problem, which was the only one that ever made any sense, and that was to stop the skyjacker from ever getting on board the plane.

By 1965, the jet airliner had become a widely accepted symbol of the power of modern civilization. A new glamour attached itself to these sleek, continent-shrinking machines, and a new word, the “jet set,” was coined to describe the elite groups of every society who flew in them. But although jet travel was still associated in the public mind with extravagance and lux­ury, by the mid-1960s it had become, in fact, the dominant mode of inter­city travel for everybody, from common people to nabobs. In short, jet avi­ation had an aura of power and romance, but everybody had access to it. It was a matter of time before psychological and political misfits, criminals, and others with a grudge against society would focus upon the jets as a means of obtaining attention and settling grievances. The airline pilot be­came, for many of these troubled people, a kind of heavenly father figure to whom they could appeal for redress, succor, or just attention. All a sky­jacker needed either to get away or to get attention from a society that ig­nored him was an airline ticket, a weapon, and the will to use it. Then somebody would have to listen to him.

This threat hung over every airline pilot. Several hundred flight crews had to face the challenge of a skyjacking, ranging from the 28-hour odyssey of Capt. William R. Haas of Southern (later Republic) to the wounding of Capt. Dale Hupe of TWA, each of whom had to make life-or-death deci­sions to save his aircraft. But no case is more significant than that of Capt. Bob Wilbur and First Officer James Hartley, Jr., of EAL.

On March 18, 1970, in a case similar to the one that sent Capt. Ernie Clark’s Pacific Air Lines F-27 plunging to earth in 1964, Bob Wilbur and Jim Hartley narrowly saved their passengers from a psychopath intent upon suicide. The deranged passenger, who forced his way at gunpoint into the cockpit of the DC-9 piloted by Wilbur and Hartley on a Newark–Boston flight, ordered them to fly eastward over the Atlantic. Wilbur’s pleas that the plane was nearly out of fuel left the skyjacker unmoved. It became appar­ent to Wilbur and Hartley that their unwelcome cockpit guest intended to kill everybody aboard. The two pilots had no alternative but to grapple with the man who stood menacingly over them with a pistol.

In as desperate a combat as two men have ever waged airborne, Wilbur and Hartley subdued the skyjacker as shots ricocheted through the cock­pit. Their victory was costly. Hartley, mortally wounded, still managed to wrest the gun from the skyjacker and shoot him with it. Wilbur, bleeding from his gunshot wounds and on the verge of losing consciousness, some­how managed to land the DC-9 at Boston. Jim Hartley died during the final approach.

For ALPA, the martyrdom of Jim Hartley meant that mere gestures (like the naming of EAL’s new flight crew training facility at Miami after Hartley) would no longer be enough. With pilots threatening to retaliate against both the government and their employers by a “suspension of service” (SOS), or simply withholding their labor for a period of time, the tide at last turned in favor of the active prevention Oscar Cleal had first suggested back in 1961. Practical electronic screening devices had been available since at least 1963, but the FAA had delayed making these passenger-screening tools mandatory because of ATA pressure against them. Although the FAA had shown considerable interest in electronic “frisking” of passengers, it moved so slowly in instituting a full-scale test of the devices at Dulles Airport in Washington that most airline pilots were disgusted. ATA gave its blessing to the Dulles tests, but insisted that it not “create an inconven­ience” for passengers and that the airline companies should not have to bear any of the expense of the system.

In 1969, the year before the tragic EAL skyjacking, the FAA finally appointed a special task force to study electronic screening of passengers on the ground, but had it not been for Jim Hartley’s death, the report of this task force would probably have been buried like others before it. The group, formally called Task Force on Deterrents to Air Piracy, was chaired by Dr. H. L. Reighard. Ultimately, the task force opted for the ALPA program of in­tensive ground screening, but not without unremitting pressure by ALPA. Jack Bavis recalls that initially the Reighard task force relied almost entirely on nonelectronic means, leaning heavily toward the “behavioral profile” as the primary means of spotting skyjackers:

When I took over, the special task force had been meeting for sev­eral months, and we knew there were major weaknesses in its ap­proach. We learned quickly that in order to get action, you had to continually chastise the government through whatever channels were available—the media, congressional hearings—otherwise they would not take the necessary steps because of the expense. The behavioral profile was fine as far as it went. Security people could be trained to spot people who would ordinarily fly tourist, but were flying out of class, Cubans with no luggage, and other likely skyjacker types. But what worked well for a while might not work later. They’d modify, change as they figured out who was being stopped from boarding, and some skyjackers just never fit it at all, so ALPA had to pressure the government hard to get them to go along with more rigorous preboarding screening. And on this we had major problems with the FAA, and it finally took President Nixon overriding them, thanks to a lot of help from John Volpe (Nixon’s secretary of transportation), a personal friend of J.J. O’Donnell’s, the newly elected president of ALPA.

After implementation of ALPA’s program, the skyjacking problem started to abate, at least on U.S. domestic flights. Combining rigorous electronic screening with behavioral profiles of boarding passengers compiled by a team of psychologists, ground security officers began to make a real dent in the rate of skyjacking. But it took a massive effort, one that caught as many innocent pranksters as serious hijackers, before the ground screen­ing program would work. Movie star Marlon Brando, for example, wound up in trouble after joking to a cabin attendant about the “arrival time in Havana.”

ALPA began to find wide public support for all its antiskyjacking ideas after the death of Jim Hartley, but amazingly, ATA and the government continued to insist, long after public opinion was clearly on the side of rigorous preboarding security, that such measures would cause a decline in passenger boardings. Perhaps the government and ATA were overly influenced by a few politicians who cited civil liberties violations as one possi­ble aspect of preboarding screening. Sen. Vance Hartke of Indiana, a pow­erful force in Congress during the 1960s, repeatedly attacked preboarding screening in a strange, quixotic crusade that once landed him in trouble for failing to open his briefcase for a ticket agent’s inspection. It was a bi­zarre episode, and similar instances probably account for the timidity of the authorities.

Although a solution was at hand to the domestic skyjacking problem after 1971, for U.S. pilots involved in international operations it was an­other story. Many pilots were never aware of IFALPA until they began to need its services desperately in the fight against international terrorism.

The events that finally gave IFALPA the leverage to act against skyjacking internationally came as the result of trouble in the Middle East. The curtain raiser took place in August 1968 with the skyjacking of an El Al airliner to Algeria. Once on the ground, the skyjackers held the Israeli nationals (and the two Israeli pilots) hostage for the release of terrorists held in Israel. There was an immediate outcry from the world’s various airline pilots’ or­ganizations. At the suggestion of the French ALPA, IFALPA sent a delegation to Algeria to negotiate the release of the hostages. Using the stick of an in­ternational boycott of all air traffic to Algeria, IFALPA got the hostages released.

Since holding hostages hadn’t worked, the radical Palestinians tried di­rect violence next. In December 1968, two Arab gunmen opened fire on a parked El Al airliner at Athens, Greece. One passenger was killed and a cabin attendant seriously wounded. Boasting of connections with the Pop­ular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the two gunmen declared they were “under orders” to kill Jews and destroy planes. Although they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms, the two gun­men would soon be released owing to further threats of the PFLP against Greece’s air commerce, thus raising the troubling question of how any country could punish terrorists when its own planes were vulnerable.

A long series of terrorist incidents directed at air commerce then en­sued. The fragile edifice of international aviation could do nothing to pro­tect itself, since both management and various governments shrank from the kind of expensive ground security systems that were beginning to be installed in the United States. Excepting only the Israelis, whose El Al planes regularly flew with their own security (even in Europe), the airline target was still wide open to terrorism as late as 1972. At this point, the world’s eyes began to turn to the United States. Only in America (and, of course, in the Communist bloc countries), was a solution to the skyjacking problem at hand. The world was ready at last to pay serious heed to the program ALPA had been advocating in the United States for nearly a decade—ground prevention. But it would come too late, and the trigger would be something the Israelis did.

Vulnerable as the Israelis were to aerial blackmail, one would think they would avoid provocation. But Israel’s hard-nosed security forces, finding out that two Algerian “security officers” were aboard a British airliner transiting Israel on a regular flight, insisted on taking them off the plane. Speculation was that the Israelis wanted to hold the two Algerians hostage for the release of their own operatives being held in Algerian jails, but no one knows for sure. In any case, the Israelis put themselves in the position of inviting retaliation, as IFALPA pointed out in a telegram to Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister. The U.S. State Department agreed with IFALPA, and ultimately the Israelis would release the two Algerians, but not before Black September was born.

The Israelis had foolishly grabbed the two Algerians in August 1970. On Sept. 6, 1970, ostensibly in retaliation for the Israelis’ detention of the two Algerians, Arab terrorists skyjacked four international flights simultaneously. Only the El Al jet among the four (the others were TWA, Pan Am, and Swissair) thwarted the skyjackers, when an onboard Israeli security agent shot it out with the skyjackers, killing one. The other, the notorious woman skyjacker, Lela Khaled, was wounded. The El Al plane survived only because the two grenades she had smuggled aboard in her brassiere had defective fuses. The other terrorists flew a Pan Am Boeing 747 to Cairo, where they landed, evacuated all the passengers via emergency chutes, and then blew up the plane. The destruction was supposed to be a “lesson” to the Egyptians for their cooperative attitude toward a peace settlement with Israel. The other two aircraft were flown to an abandoned World War II airstrip in Jordan, where the occupants were held inside the airplanes without air conditioning or proper sanitation for nearly two weeks while the skyjackers tried to negotiate the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. When the British government refused to turn over the wounded Lela Khaled to the skyjackers, another team of skyjackers seized a British air­liner and added it to the collection of planes squatting in the desert. Meanwhile, the world waited tensely for the ordeal to end.

Through massive diplomatic pressure, the terrorists were finally forced to release their captives. The radical Palestinians blew up all the aircraft as a parting gesture, however, and in a sense they badly overplayed their hand. Although they succeeded in blackmailing the British into releasing Lela Khaled (who was later fictionalized as the murderous female guerrilla in the movie and novel Black Sunday), the Palestinians had worn out their welcome with Jordan’s King Hussein. The Jordanian army subsequently crushed the Palestinian forces operating out of Jordan before the month ended—“Black September,” as radical Arabs would call it ever after.

The events leading up to Black September would ultimately convince the nations of the world that skyjacking could be eradicated only by the strongest and most concerted of international efforts. In a sense, ALPA and IFALPA had won their battle to force authorities at the highest levels to make the safety and security of commercial aviation a matter of interna­tional policy. In the United States, the fruits of ALPA’s labor were most ap­parent in the Antihijacking Act of 1974, one of the last pieces of legislation Richard Nixon signed before his resignation. The law was the result of a program of continuous pressure, ranging from the worldwide SOS in 1972, which saw many airline pilots throughout the world in symbolic and practical protest refuse to fly, to such “nuts-and-bolts” work as that done by ALPA’s Flight Security Committee and ALPA’s Air Safety Forum. Internation­ally, IFALPA would press for ratification of the Tokyo and Montreal conven­tions against aerial piracy, a principal provision of which was levying sanc­tions against any nation granting sanctuary to skyjackers.

But the Antihijacking Act of 1974, the first measure to curb aerial piracy that could be called “bulletproof,” wasn’t born without a great deal of pain and effort, some of which put ominous strains on ALPA’s internal unity. Despite the 160 skyjackings of U.S. airliners from 1968 to 1972, which included the murder of one airline pilot and the wounding of eight others, many airline pilots were unwilling to give more than verbal support to the antiskyjacking crusade. Some pilots supported airline management when it resisted antihijacking measures as too costly. For ALPA’s Flight Security Committee, headed by Tom Ashwood of TWA, this lack of internal unity, beyond mere lip service, was a major headache. By 1972, Ashwood’s committee had devised a training syllabus to teach pilots how to handle skyjackers, but the various airlines resisted implementing a “standardized” program. “There are indications that airline managements are objecting to any plan of training outside their individual control,” Ashwood declared in frustration.

Clearly, one of J.J. O’Donnell’s biggest challenges as ALPA’s president was to find out just how firmly modern airline pilots would stand together in a true crisis. It all boiled down to the question of whether or not the blood of the pioneers who had formed ALPA still coursed through the veins of their modern successors. The vehicle to reveal the intestinal fortitude of modern pilots, or the lack thereof, was the SOS crisis of 1972. The portents of this June 1972 episode were ominous, suggesting that the interline unity of professional airline pilots could not stand the kind of stress that their professional forebears had endured to form ALPA.

The idea of a temporary nationwide work stoppage surfaced spontaneously at the local level on several airlines (particularly EAL) after IFALPA’s endorsement of the tactic in 1971. The SOS called for shutting down flights throughout the country for either 24 or 48 hours as a theoretical exercise in “freedom of speech or expression.” For J.J. O’Donnell, who was still feeling his way into the presidency, the SOS would allow him to see if ALPA members would really stick together and follow the dictates of their Board of Directors. No airline would dare to fire pilots for a work stoppage in vio­lation of a contract, if everybody hung together. But if some airlines re­fused to honor the SOS, it would weaken the whole project, drive a wedge between pilot groups, and suggest that modern pilots were incapable of unified action even in matters of life and death, theirs and those of the passengers whose lives had been entrusted to them.

For this reason, J.J. O’Donnell and the Executive Board raised the SOS idea carefully, until finally a consensus emerged that such drastic action was necessary. O’Donnell himself had become convinced by early 1971 that an SOS was worth trying, but he necessarily had to develop support among the Executive Board members before he moved. Finally, in June 1972, after a great deal of careful spadework by Capt. O’Donnell, Capt. Tom Ashwood, and Jack Bavis, the Executive Board acted, authorizing ALPA’s participation in a 24-hour, worldwide SOS. O’Donnell was given au­thority to determine how and when the stoppage would occur. IFALPA set the SOS for June 19, 1972. It was, as we have seen, a dangerous and risky step, but also one that O’Donnell felt honor-bound to carry out. O’Donnell remembers:

The ALPA Board of Directors had passed in 1968, 1969, and in the early 1970s a series of strong policy statements on skyjacking. Be­cause of the inability of the United Nations to act strongly, the inter­national federation, not ALPA, called for a worldwide strike on June 19, 1972. We were trapped by this date. We had an emergency Ex­ecutive Board, and we all agreed. Everybody was patting every­body on the back, the suspension was going to occur. But as we got closer to the date, the master chairmen were all talking to each other; some started to weaken.

On the very day that rumors of rebellion in the ranks began to circulate, J.J. O’Donnell was scheduled to appear on Face the Nation. Confronted with hostile questions from the panelists, who cited comments of some other ALPA officials that they would not support the SOS, O’Donnell was in an uncomfortable position. He was also facing a court action that ATA had immediately filed to stop the SOS. O’Donnell put on a resolute perform­ance, partly to intimidate his opponents, and partly to buck up his own wavering troops. He promised to go ahead. “I am not a lawyer; the injunc­tion is for the lawyers to argue,” O’Donnell said on national television. “But I do want to say one thing. There is no way I will order my people to go to work.” The ghosts of John L. Lewis and Dave Behncke must have been ap­plauding—but the response of some ALPA members was considerably less enthusiastic.

When the crunch came, some airlines shut down, notably EAL, Southern (SOU), and Northwest, but others, notably TWA and Delta, did not, although there were exceptions on every airline. Master Chairman Bill Arsenault of United Airlines (UAL) was furious at the timidity of his own master executive council (MEC), as were others such as Bill Davis, a UAL 747 cap­tain who walked off his plane in Detroit because he knew the company could not get a replacement 747 pilot there. Many other UAL crews simply walked off their planes in defiance of both the company and their own MEC.

On some airlines the SOS broke down completely, thus threatening ALPA’s internal unity. Eastern’s pilots were openly furious at Delta’s, whom they accused of cowardice. Not a few EAL pilots were heard to say openly that if Jim Hartley had been a Delta pilot, the attitude of Delta’s pilots to­ward the SOS would have been different.

Shortly after the SOS episode, a skyjacking occurred on SOU that drove home just how vulnerable professional airline pilots were, perhaps giving pause to those who refused to support the SOS and causing renewed con­cern about the bumbling machismo some ground security personnel had displayed in trying to halt skyjackings.

Capt. William R. “Billy Bob” Haas and First Officer Harold Johnson had been skyjacked by three petty criminals with a grudge against the city of Detroit, after taking off from Birmingham, Ala., in November 1972. If this sounds just a bit strange, wait—the story gets stranger. The three sky­jackers ordered Haas to fly northward to Detroit, where they demanded $10 million from city officials. While they waited for somebody on the ground at Detroit to round up the money (eventually SOU’s management got a suitcase full to give them, although it was nowhere near $10 million), the three skyjackers got roaring drunk, forced all the male passengers to disrobe, and generally terrorized everybody aboard. After securing the money hastily rounded up by SOU’s ground personnel in Detroit, the sky­jackers forced Haas to take off, thus commencing a wandering aerial odys­sey that spanned the continent from Canada to Cuba. The skyjackers threat­ened to crash the plane into the nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and at one point demanded to speak to the president of the United States. Land­ing in Cuba, the skyjackers thought that the Cubans would welcome them as heroes with their suitcase of extorted money. But the tough-looking Cuban soldiers surrounding the airplane had unnerved the skyjackers, and a Cuban spokesman was noncommittal about their future in Cuba, so they forced Haas to take off once more. By the time FBI agents decided to keep the SOU DC-9 on the ground at Orlando at all costs by shooting out the tires, they were probably justified in doing so, although this action led the skyjackers to shoot First Officer Johnson and force Haas to attempt a take­off on flat tires. Somehow Haas did it.

They grabbed Harold out of the cockpit right after the plane started settling on the gear rims and they were cussing and shooting their pistols out each window, and one of them said, “O.K., Har­old, this is it, you’re gonna die,” and one of them shot him. I heard the shots back in the cabin and they told me to take off or they were going to kill me, too. I said that I couldn’t take off without a copilot. I thought they’d killed him, but one of them said, “Naw, he’s not dead,” and they then slammed him back into the seat with a bullet in his arm. I added power and somehow we started rolling. Harold was in bad shape, blood all over, and I said, “Harold, don’t pass out on me.” The airspeed kept rising and I figured I’d run off the end of the runway; there was a highway I could sort of set down on there, I hoped. I never figured it would fly, but somehow the airspeed kept climbing. All sorts of things were going through my head. I felt sure the oil caps were off and that the engines were going to seize up any minute. And all of a sudden the airpseed jumped and I rotated and we were airborne. I told Harold he had to help me, and somehow he started flipping switches, and we made it.

The crippled DC-9, smoke trailing from its burning landing gear, headed for Havana for the second time that day.

“When I got off the airplane and I was helping to put out the fire,” Haas remembers, “Castro was standing right there under the wing, looking at the gear. He came up to me and said, ‘I want to shake the hand of the man who kept that plane in the air.’ I had been doing a lot of work on my house, and my hands were rough and calloused. He looked at them and said, through an interpreter, ‘These are the hands of a man who works.’ And then he gave me a big hug. He was very flattering and quite personable.”

Nearly every pilot who was skyjacked to Cuba came away feeling that the Cubans were going to be very hard on their unwelcome guests. Billy Bob Haas cooperated in the ALPA program to widely publicize the comments of Cuban officials indicating that skyjackers had an unpleasant life awaiting them in Cuba. The object of this program was to dissuade potential skyjackers from trying it, and perhaps it worked.

Haas credits his survival and that of his crew and passengers partly to training he received in handling skyjackers psychologically. “It was mostly common sense,” Haas recalls. “We just tried to keep them talking, hu­moring them, establishing personal contact, that sort of thing.” ALPA was responsible for the various companies’ training programs. Among the first program initiated by J.J. O’Donnell was one on “hijacking management.” In 1971, the Executive Board authorized distributing educational material on aberrant behavior and cooperating with the airlines and the FAA in a program for educating flight crews in handling such behavior. Haas remembers the brief formal psychological training program even though he admits to not paying really close attention, “Like everybody else, I never thought it would happen to me.”

The FBI’s intervention in the SOU skyjacking posed a mortal danger to Haas and his crew, despite an ALPA Executive Board resolution adopted in December 1971 requiring that “the pilot in command of any aircraft whose safety is being threatened shall have complete and final authority on all questions relating to the handling of the hijacker’s demands, whether the aircraft is at the ramp, taxiing, and/or en route.” This policy flowed directly from the FBI’s earlier intervention during a skyjacking of a charter flight at Jacksonville, Fla., that resulted in the death of the pilot. By 1974, after ALPA’s heavy lobbying had secured passage of the new antihijacking law, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were clearly subordinated to FAA in handling skyjackings. ALPA President J.J. O’Donnell insisted that a provision of the 1974 law stated clearly that aviation authorities would have “exclusive responsibility for the direction of any law enforcement activity affecting the safety of flight.”

In retrospect, perhaps the most amazing thing about the passage of the 1974 antihijacking statute was that ALPA managed to secure it despite the obvious division within the ranks of professional airline pilots. Like an athlete who manages to win even on days when he is not performing at peak ability, ALPA somehow managed to accomplish its goals. Only in the area of “automatic sanctions” against nations harboring skyjackers did the 1974 law fall short of ALPA expectations.

ALPA President O’Donnell stressed that the excellence of the 1974 law should not allow the air transportation industry “to be lulled into a false sense of complacency.” Since he had been fighting the skyjacking menace steadily for nearly four years and had endured many of the same frustra­tions as his predecessor, Charley Ruby, J.J. O’Donnell took understandable pride in the passage of the 1974 law.

“The new law is the result of sacrifice, bloodshed, anxiety, pain, and abuse suffered by flight deck and cabin crews,” O’Donnell declared in 1974. “It is the result of long, frustrating, laborious effort on the part of ALPA members, committees, officers, and staff, who made sure that the leg­islation did not become lost in the congressional jungle.”

The response of professional airline pilots to the skyjacking menace was at once heartening and disquieting. Many pilots displayed quiet courage and a willingness to stand tough in support of effective remedies backed by ALPA. But at the same time, many other pilots proved, by their tepid responses to the 1972 SOS, that the mere theoretical threat of disciplinary ac­tion by their airlines was sufficient to deter them from strong action, even in matters of life and death.

For J.J. O’Donnell, the response of rank-and-file members to ALPA initia­tives in the skyjacking crisis could not have been encouraging. But if the SOS was not a success, it was at least a learning experience, one from which O’Donnell would have to profit if he were to remain in a viable position vis-a-vis his membership. O’Donnell’s strengths, it was widely agreed, were as a conciliator and negotiator, so he began patiently patching ALPA back together after the 1972 SOS episode, concentrating on a series of spe­cific proposals to be included in what would ultimately be the antiskyjacking legislation passed by Congress in 1974.

“I’ve had to eat a hell of a lot of crow to keep ALPA together,” O’Donnell recalls. “Mike Lyon, the vice-chairman of the PAA [Pan American] MEC, told me I wouldn’t get many guys to pat me on the back as president. I am hu­man, and I get ticked off, and I wonder sometimes why I should be doing this for these people. But pilots on every airline would see what was happening, they’d be embarrassed at the weakness of some of their own people, they would see the need for a strong Association, and they would express their appreciation. Maybe that’s what’s kept me going.”

Nobody ever promised J.J. O’Donnell a rose garden as the president of ALPA. It was a good thing he knew it before accepting the office.

To Chapter 25

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