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
Just after Fidel Castro seized power in
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
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
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
It was the first skyjacking to
On July 24, 1961, barely three
months later, an EAL Electra with 38 passengers aboard was diverted to
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
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
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
“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, “
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
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
For ALPA, the martyrdom of Jim Hartley meant that mere gestures
(like the naming of EAL’s new flight crew training facility at
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
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
Although a solution was at hand to the domestic skyjacking
problem after 1971, for
The events that finally gave IFALPA the leverage to act against
skyjacking internationally came as the result of trouble in the
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
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
Vulnerable as the Israelis
were to aerial blackmail, one would think they would avoid provocation. But
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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.