Southern Airways of Atlanta prides itself on
its ante bellum hospitality. Its blue-and-yellow planes even have smile
faces painted on the nose under the inscription HAVE A NICE DAY. But no
one was smiling after one of the most theatrical and spectacularly
prolonged episodes in the chronicles of skyjacking. Three men armed
with pistols and a hand grenade boarded Flight 49 in Birmingham and
took the 30 passengers and four crew members on an odyssey of terror
that ended 29 hours later in Havana. Everybody lost something on the
flight: the copilot was wounded, the passengers were badly shaken,
Southern Airways may be financially crippled by the ransom it paid, the
FBI has been damned for a trigger-happy performance and the hijackers
are said to be condemned to spend the rest of their lives in
4-by-5-by-5-ft. cells in Fidel Castro's Cuba. On top of all that, the
painful problem of prevention still begs for solution. Flight 49, a two-engine DC-9, took off from the Birmingham airport
peaceably enough. Professor Gale Buchanan, a plant expert at Auburn
University, began editing copy for his magazine, Weeds Today. Alex
Halberstadt, a construction engineer, scribbled idly on a yellow legal
pad. A two-year-old child fell asleep in his mother's arms. In the rear
of the plane, Alvin Fortson, 83, sat back to enjoy the ride to Orlando
to see his son. But also at the rear were three blacks—Henry Jackson,
25, Lewis Moore, 27, and Melvin Cale, 21—who had no intention of going
to Orlando. Jackson and Moore were wanted for suspicion of rape in
Detroit, where they had once sued the city for $4,000,000 for alleged
police brutality. Cale, Moore's half brother, had been serving time in
the Tennessee State Penitentiary for grand larceny, and was a recent
escapee from a work release center. The trio managed to get past
Southern agents by the old and obvious device of concealing their
weapons in a raincoat and passing it back and forth. Courage. Airborne, the trio brandished their weapons and ordered the
pilot to make a refueling stop at Jackson, Miss., then head for
Detroit. Since embarrassment helps keep people in line, the three also
forced the male passengers to strip to their underwear. The hijackers
soon broadcast their ambitious demand: $10 million in cash.
Southern Airways placed $500,000 aboard an aircraft and dispatched it to
Detroit in hopes of a settlement. Despite the efforts of Detroit
officials to talk the hijackers into landing, they made the pilot shoot
across Lake Erie to Cleveland's Hopkins Airport. Meanwhile, the
passengers showed extraordinary courage. Halberstadt called to Moore,
“If you have a minute, I'd like to talk to you,” and tried to reason
with the hijacker while Moore held a Luger and the hand grenade.
