Another Story for Bo

[weldertom]

that lands in my small hometown ,Lake Jackson ,Texas.

I was 15 when this happened. A friend and I sneaked through some woods to the end of the runway on this day and watched it with binoculars for a few hours....

from thefacts.com

Hijackers steer 727 to county airport

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published March 3, 2008

On July 12, 1972, more than 20 years before fears of terrorism began gripping American travelers, two air pirates hijacked a plane carrying more than 100 passengers and seven crew members.

The first act of this violent episode took place half-a-continent away from Brazoria County as passengers in Virginia boarded a scheduled flight during a stop on its trip from Miami to New York City’s Kennedy Airport.

Tension entered the scenario in mid-air as the flight was diverted to Philadelphia, where hijackers demanded a ransom of $600,000, along with another plane and two parachutes.

The drama moved the next morning to the totally unlikely site of Dow Chemical Co.’s small commuter airport in the quiet residential town of Lake Jackson.

As area residents traveled to their jobs just before 8 a.m. that day, many of them noticed a huge plane, a Boeing 727 airliner, flying erratically over Brazoria County and then circling over the Dow airport. The plane flew at a low altitude and moved jerkily, alerting those who saw it that the aircraft was in trouble.

If the pilot’s intent was to land in Lake Jackson, the plane was, indeed, in trouble. The runway of the Dow airport was far too short for such a big plane to land safely. And though most observers probably didn’t realize it, the runway’s surface had not been designed to withstand the plane’s tremendous weight.

But as the roar of the plane’s engines grew louder, second by second, it became all too apparent that whatever the obstacles, the pilot intended to land there.

At the Dow Agricultural Department building near the airport, an employee heard the roar and looked up to see the airliner barely miss trees on its approach to the airport.

“It looked like it was coming in upside down,” she told a reporter from The Facts later that morning, adding the plane sounded “like a jet breaking the sound barrier or buzzing someone’s house.”

As her co-workers raced outside to see the source of the noise, the woman thought briefly of a tornado and of crawling under a desk, she said.

A Lake Jackson patrolman at a nearby motel also heard the noise. Looking up to see the plane descending and anticipating a disaster, he rushed to the airport.

Even those residents who were aware of the situation probably did not realize the plane and its occupants were the focus of national TV and radio news stories about an act of air piracy. They were more involved in routine activities, and their concerns were centered on a local news story — a strike at Dow Chemical.

As the county’s biggest employer, the effects of the Dow strike affected not only the company’s employees, but the area’s entire population.

Representatives of the striking unions and of the company, who were accusing each other of violence, had made little or no progress in negotiations, leaving hundreds of workers idle and creating staffing problems for the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office.

At this time, the entire complement of employees for the sheriff’s office, including jailers and dispatchers, was much less than 100.

All three of the Brazosport-area deputies were busy trying to keep the peace and regulate traffic through picket lines at Dow. Despite this, once the airliner screeched to a halt just short of the end of the local airport’s runway, a phalanx of law enforcement officers — including deputies, local police, state troopers, Dow security and the FBI — converged at the Dow airport.

Even those residents who hadn’t been alerted by the plane’s roar knew something untoward had happened once patrol cars activated their sirens as they streaked toward the airport.

Inside their homes, people throughout the area began switching on radios and television sets, learning to their surprise that a hijacking half a continent away now was all too relevant to their lives. It was all new to most of them, who had either missed or paid little attention to the original newscasts about the Philadelphia incident.

Now they learned two men had boarded the airliner at a stop in Virginia, brandishing guns. When the plane was diverted to Philadelphia, the co-pilot, Norman W. Reagan, radioed the airport’s control tower and said one of the hijackers was holding a sawed-off shotgun at his throat while the other was leveling an automatic pistol on the throat of a stewardess.

After landing in Philadelphia, the hijackers held crew members and passengers — a total listed in various accounts at 118 and 120 — as hostages. About two hours into the negotiations there, the pilot, Elliott Adams, managed to escape.

The air pirates threatened their hostages’ safety unless authorities provided them with another plane, fuel, $600,000 in cash and two parachutes.

The stalemate continued for nine hours, during which one of the stewardesses radioed the Philadelphia tower to report people aboard the plane, which was not running an air conditioner, were “very, very sick.”

“You’ve got to do something,” she begged.

Tom Herring of St. Louis, a passenger on the flight, later told the press the plane’s air conditioning had been shut down after it landed, and the heat aboard was unbearable. Some of the passengers fainted during this time, he said.

Authorities eventually provided the hijackers with a box containing a large amount of cash, a fueled National Airlines Boeing 727 jet airliner and two parachutes.

The gunmen released all of the passengers but continued to hold the co-pilot, an engineer and four female flight attendants as hostages.

The airliner took off from Philadelphia, flew across the country’s mid-section, then headed south, circling over the Dallas-Fort Worth area early on the morning of July 13, then heading over the Gulf of Mexico.

Sometime during this part of the flight, one of the hijackers shot the flight engineer in the thigh. Once they realized the plane’s fuel was insufficient to take them out of the United States, the hijackers directed the pilot to backtrack toward Houston.

By the time the airliner reached southern Brazoria County, the fuel level had reached a critical stage.

No airplane this large had ever landed at Dow’s small commuter airport, which was across Highway 332 from the present site of Brazos Mall, but a landing there was imminent.

Next week: Emergency landing in Lake Jackson.

Marie Beth Jones ia a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton.

[weldertom]

Youth aids injured man

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published March 10, 2008

In the early morning of July 13, 1972, 18-year-old Henry Marcus was hurrying to drive his 10-year-old brother, Charles, to a swimming lesson at the Lake Jackson Recreation Center.

Charles spotted a Boeing 727 flying very low and yelled, “Look over there! Look over there!”

Ignoring his brother, Henry parked the pickup, and got out in the pouring rain to get Charles’ bicycle out of the back. That was when he saw both a helicopter and the huge plane.

What neither boy realized at the time was the plane was one that had been hijacked and was trying to land at the Dow airport, one with a runway much too short for such a large plane to land or take off safely.

In his story about the incident, printed in The Facts a few days later, Henry told of seeing the plane drop as though it had hit turbulence or was out of control. As it reached a point fairly near the airport, it suddenly “went up like it was almost upside down and disappeared into the clouds,” the teenager said.

Henry, who thought these events were weird, got back into his truck and saw the plane reappear from the clouds, so close that the youth thought for a moment it might hit the airport. He remembered it looked “like a plane in an air show doing a stunt.”

While it looked big in the sky, it was even more enormous when it landed, he said. Driving to the airport, he was unable to see anything, so he drove down the road to the city dump, where he saw a man — who he later learned was the flight engineer, Gerald Beaver — “stumbling and waving his arms for me to stop. I was pretty sure he was from the plane, that it was in trouble and someone had been hurt.”

Henry opened the door and saw Beaver’s hand was bleeding and he seemed dazed. Beaver asked if he was in Palacios. When Henry told him he was in Lake Jackson, Beaver asked him to, “Get me to the police station quick — and hurry up.”

Henry asked if the pilot had lost control. Beaver said that wasn’t the case, in fact the pilot “was just great,” but the plane had been hijacked.

He told Henry the gunmen who had taken over the plane “wanted to go to Jamaica or someplace,” but the plane didn’t have enough fuel. Henry recalled Beaver appeared exhausted and as though he might have been beaten.

The Lake Jackson youth accompanied Beaver into the Lake Jackson police station, where he told a dispatcher Beaver had come from the plane. Everyone in the station appeared to be extremely busy, Henry said, and no one paid any attention to him.

It took about 10 minutes before the youth was able to get anyone’s attention, and they began to take care of the dazed Beaver.

Explaining to The Facts reporter that he had felt in the way amid the commotion inside the station, Henry said he left to go to his summer job at his father’s business, Marcus Mechanical Contractors in Clute.

There, he told other employees what had happened, and they contacted Henry’s parents, who told him not to go around the airport.

Despite this, Henry said, he drove near there about 10:30 a.m. to see what was happening and also made several trips to the police station, where the atmosphere remained chaotic. He later checked on Beaver’s condition at Community Hospital, where a spokesman said Beaver was all right.

At home that night, Henry related his experiences to his 13-year-old sister, Jackie, and in a telephone conversation with his grandmother in St. Louis, and also called Beaver’s home in Houston.

Mrs. Beaver thanked the teenager, telling him her husband was sleeping but was doing well. She said Beaver had wanted to thank the youth, but didn’t know his name.

Reflecting on the incident a day or two later, Henry marveled that Beaver had made it from the airport to the dump road, which involved having to cross two fences and run through weeds and grass.

Another eyewitness to the plane’s descent was Bob Bryan of Lake Jackson, who was a flight instructor at the Dow airport. Bryan said he saw the airliner land just before he and a student, Anthony Roznovsky, prepared to take off on a practice flight.

Because it was raining in Lake Jackson, they planned to fly to another airport to practice takeoffs and landings and were turning at the south end of the runway to check for other planes when the giant airliner appeared from low-lying storm clouds and made a 90-degree bank, Roznovsky said.

The huge plane was making “some real violent maneuvers,” Roznovsky told a newspaper reporter years later, “banks like you don’t see airliners do very often.”

It landed on the short runway, burning rubber, and barely managed to stop before running off the asphalt strip.

“When it hit the runway, its tires blew out,” Roznovsky said. “The pilot hit the thrust reversers so hard it looked like the plane was on fire.”

The pilot and Beaver, a 37-year-old resident of Spring, jumped out of the airliner’s two-story high cockpit before the plane stopped moving. Co-pilot Norman W. Reagan broke his wrist and pelvis in the fall, and was bleeding from his head.

Roznovsky and Bryan, who thought Reagan had been shot, ran onto the runway to drag him from the area. A Lake Jackson patrolman drove up and his patrol car got stuck nearby.

Lake Jackson Fire Chief Paul Israel and Assistant Fire Chief Milton Decker arrived in an ambulance and rushed around the still-roaring airliner to pick the pilot up from the runway.

In a feature story in The Facts years later, Israel was quoted as saying that as he and Decker passed near the plane, they wondered whether somebody was going to point a gun out the open window of the pilot’s cabin and shoot them.

On that day and in those circumstances, the plane’s window “looked very big,” Israel said. “It looked like you could drive a truck through it.”

The two firefighters loaded the injured man into the ambulance and drove to Community Hospital. Reagan was transferred to Houston’s Methodist Hospital later that morning and was reported by attendants there to be in good condition.

Law enforcement officers quickly cordoned off the airport, placing roadblocks to isolate the area.

The hijackers were identified as Michael Stanley Green, a parking lot attendant; and Lulseyd Tesfa, an Ethiopian national who was

a student at Howard University, both of whom lived in Washington, D.C.

Next week: Sheriff asserts his jurisdiction.

Marie Beth Jones is a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton.

[weldertom]

Our Sheriff Robert Gladney was the quintessential Texas Sheriff....................

Sheriff kept reins on 1972 hijacking

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published March 17, 2008

The strike at Dow Chemical was the big local news in July 1972. Brazoria County Sheriff Robert Gladney had just left the strike scene after checking traffic there and was driving toward the courthouse in Angleton when a dispatcher radioed him.

An airplane that had been hijacked in the Northeast had landed at Lake Jackson, she said.

When the sheriff asked what size plane was involved, she told him it was a 747.

Gladney’s response was immediate.

“A plane that big can’t land on that airport,” he said.

Her response was equally quick. “Maybe not, but it’s there.”

Gladney turned around and sped to the airport, where he found the situation pretty well under control. A roadblock was in place and officers — “enough so that every time those men looked out of the plane, they could see someone” — surrounded the aircraft.

He learned that four flight attendants still were being held by two hijackers, who were identified as Lulseyd Tesfa, an Ethiopian national who was a student at Howard University, and Michael Stanley Green, a parking lot attendant. Both lived in Washington, D.C.

Gladney also was told two male crew members — the pilot, Norman W. Reagan, and the flight engineer, Gerald Beaver — had been injured when they jumped from the airliner. Reagan was the more seriously hurt, having broken his wrist and his pelvis in the fall, and had been bleeding from his head when an ambulance took him from the scene.

After learning of the situation, Gladney sent Jacque Wood, one of his deputies, “to talk to the man in the hospital, get details of the situation and call me.”

Officials ordered all air traffic to stay away from the airport to prevent any movement that might frighten the gunmen and cause them to injure the hostages or anyone else.

When Gladney arrived, the airliner’s engines were running. Wood learned from the hospitalized pilot that the plane had enough fuel for two more hours.

Since he could see flattened tires on the craft and knew there was no pilot aboard, Gladney felt confident the airliner was unable to take off.

In a recent conversation about the situation, he remembered details of the situation.

“It was July,” he said. “It had showered hard that morning for six or seven minutes and then the sun came out, and even that early in the day it felt like it was a hundred degrees out there.”

Soon after the sheriff arrived, Sande Schmitt, a 25-year-old stewardess from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., dropped to the wing of the plane, then to the ground and ran toward Gladney.

The hijackers had sent her to relay their demands: a plane and a pilot to take them to another country. They would take the hostages to the runway beside the new plane and get aboard before releasing the women as the aircraft took off.

“That ain’t goin’ to happen,” Gladney said.

About 10 a.m., when the plane’s fuel ran out and the roar of the engines died, the gunmen communicated their demands through three stewardesses using a bullhorn.

These remaining hostages were Catherine A. Nosse, 26, of Miami Springs, Fla., and Donna S. Thomas, 24, and Linda Joiner, 24, both of Miami, Fla.

One after another, the women sat before the open doorway of the airliner’s emergency exit during the eight-hour ordeal, but the air pirates primarily remained out of the officers’ view.

Gladney maintained communication with the dispatcher at his office from his car, which was parked on the airport’s runway. He looked up a short time later to see a helicopter landing with the first group of FBI agents to arrive at the scene. This contingent of federal officers eventually would total about 50.

The FBI agents set up a command center in the airport, where police from surrounding cities, state troopers, Dow security officers and Lake Jackson firefighters were on the scene.

“A few minutes later one feller in his suit and tie came running down the pavement and whipped out his ID,” Gladney remembered recently.

“This feller said, ‘I’m Special Agent So-and-So with the FBI, and we are in charge of this skyjacking scene.’”

Gladney, a tall, laconic man, looked down at the much shorter federal agent and replied, “I am the sheriff of Brazoria County. Let me ask you to repeat what you just said.

“He repeated it, word for word, and I said, ‘I am Robert Gladney, and in Brazoria County I am in charge,” Gladney told him. “If these people expected me to turn my work over to somebody else, I don’t believe they would have elected me as sheriff.”

As Gladney remembers this confrontation, the agent stepped back in surprise and said, “I am going to have to call Washington.”

“I told him to go right ahead and to come back and tell me what Washington had to say,” Gladney recalled. “When he came back, he said his instructions were to work with the sheriff any way he could, if I would allow him to do so.”

“I told him that would be fine, so long as he let me be in charge.”

Gladney then explained that on a July day on the Texas Gulf Coast, without air conditioning in the plane, it wouldn’t take long before the hijackers “are going to think they are in Hell, and they are going to come out.”

Still garbed in his suit coat and tie, mopping his dripping brow, and breathless from running back and forth across the steaming pavement in an attempt to communicate with the air pirates, the FBI agent nodded in apparent understanding.

Heat waves danced above the asphalt and off the skin of the plane as the temperature rose, adding to Gladney’s confidence that the climate would be the deciding factor in the confrontation.

Next week: Problems with news crews.

Marie Beth Jones is a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton.

[bgl]

Tom,

Sounds like that should be in an instruction manual: "How NOT to hijack an airliner"!!  And be more careful when you pick your destination!

Bo-Göran

[palmsrgreat]

Ok, now I'm hooked on this story...More, more, more!

[weldertom]

OK  Palmsrgreat - Here is this week's continuation......

Tempers flared with media in hijacking

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published March 24, 2008

When Houston television crews arrived at the Dow airport where a hijacked airliner had landed on July 13, 1972, tension rose to a point even higher than the spiraling temperature that Sheriff Robert Gladney was confident would force the hijackers to surrender.

Officers were forced to deal with the recalcitrant horde of reporters pushing against fences and attempting to evade crime-scene tape barriers in an effort to get a better story or photograph than their competitors.

Joe King, then a 29-year-old state trooper who would later serve as county sheriff and now as county judge of Brazoria County, was enjoying the day off.

He had been fishing that morning, and when it started raining he climbed in his car to stay dry. That was when he heard radio station KIKK announce that a hijacked airliner had landed in Lake Jackson.

Kings’ first reaction was disbelief. Although Brazoria County had a few large industries, it was still mostly rural, and had thus far escaped most of the problems that were prevalent in metropolitan areas in the 1960s and 1970s.

After driving to Angleton to get his patrol car, King headed toward Lake Jackson, listening to heavy traffic on his police radio, much of it concerning a blue Ford that had run through roadblocks.

When he reached the airport, the blue Ford with the license number given by officers was right in front of him.

Looking inside the vehicle, King flashed his credentials, and asked the two occupants for identification. This revealed that Ronald Kershaw was the driver who had steered around the roadblocks and that Kershaws’ passenger was Gregory Moore. Both were employees of KTRK, a Houston television station.

King asked the men to step out of the car. One of them cursed him as Kershaw slammed the car in reverse, dragging the trooper until a sheriff’s department car cut them off.

King and a Lake Jackson policeman pulled the two newsmen out of the car and attempted to confiscate a camera.

Allen Pengelly, a TV news cameraman who had ridden to the scene in a helicopter, ran toward them and filmed the scuffle, and Jessica Savitch, a newscaster, ran up with her microphone.

Kershaw, who had been cut on the chin in the incident, was still rolling around in the dirt of a drainage ditch with the officer, and “the furious Jessica,” who was dressed in a pink and white pantsuit, “went to Kershaw’s aid, swiftly kicking the downed officer twice in the kidney region,” according to Alanna Nash’s “Golden Girl,” a Signet paperback book about Savitch.

The book states when the confrontation was over, Savitch, a gorgeous blonde newswoman for KHOU-TV in Houston, Kershaw and Moore all were arrested and taken to the Lake Jackson police station.

Moore was charged with failure to obey a police officer, and Ron and Jessica with assault. The three media representatives spent several hours in jail before their TV stations posted bonds. Nash’s book reports the charges against them were dismissed five days later.

Asked about the incident for a feature story that ran in The Facts in 1993, King said while the Lake Jackson policeman was wrestling with Moore, “Miss Jessica Savitch came running up … and started kicking and stomping on him.”

Once the trio had been restrained, King radioed Sheriff Gladney, asking what he wanted done with Savitch.

“Wait just a minute,” Gladney replied after hearing the story. He immediately contacted the Lake Jackson PD and asked if they had space in their jail. Receiving an affirmative answer, he told King to “Put her … in the Lake Jackson jail.”

When reminded of the incident recently, Gladney drawled, “We treated her like a lady till she proved she wasn’t.”

The incident did little to enhance Savitch’s reputation as a responsible journalist. A competing Houston TV station got not only the hijacking story, but prime footage of Savitch’s part in the confrontation with police.

In his voice-over narration of the story, Kershaw pointed out, “That foot belongs to Jessica Savitch,” and noted that she was “always one to stand up for freedom of the press.”

Savitch was suspended from KHOU for three days because of the incident — the first time in the station’s history that one of its reporters had received such a punishment.

She and the two men involved in the fracas filed a complaint against King, according to a Facts story in 1993, but he was cleared after two other reporters testified on his behalf.

Savitch went on to become a network correspondent and part-time anchorwoman before she was killed in a one-vehicle traffic accident. Her car plunged into a ditch filled with four feet of water in the northeastern part of the country.

Even though they were mostly unaware of the media incident at the Dow airport, the crowd outside that facility grew during the day.

“They swarmed around the roads in an automotive torrent; repeatedly attempted to slip police barricades, and disregarded their personal safety in an attempt just to glimpse the big plane and some of the players in the drama,” a 1993 Brazorian News feature story stated.

Nearer the main focus of the hijacking event, an FBI agent complained to Gladney that the hijackers wouldn’t respond to his conciliatory attempts to communicate with them.

After telling the agent the air pirates “didn’t understand” him, Gladney proceeded to demonstrate his idea of how to communicate with the hijackers, demanding not only the release of the women still held as hostages, but also the hijackers’ immediate surrender.

His communication was phrased in words and a tone the men apparently had no difficulty deciphering.

Next week: Tempers flare as standoff continues.

Marie Beth Jones is a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton.

[bgl]

Probably the most exciting day in Brazoria County in the last 100 years....

[palmsrgreat]

Thanks for the update Tom, I'm ready to get back to the action of sweating out the hijackers!

[weldertom]

Keep in mind these law enforcement  and media (I knew/know some of them through my family) are of the same culture that brought you the "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" story/saga.

[weldertom]

Here is this weeks continuation...............................

Sheriff recounts hijackers’ demands

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published March 31, 2008

Several hours after a hijacked 747 airliner made an emergency landing at the small Dow airport in July 1972, the hijackers aboard continued to negotiate for an escape.

They wanted a small plane and a pilot to take them out of the country, along with a sum of money. In return, they said, they would release their three remaining hostages without harm.

To assure that the pilot sent to them would not be armed, they would require that he strip to his shorts.

Brazoria County Sheriff Robert Gladney scoffed at the idea of agreeing to these demands.

Remembering that time, Gladney said recently he had his county car on the pavement at the airport so he could maintain radio communications with the dispatcher.

“We didn’t have any cell phones or hand-held radios, or anything like that,” he explained.

He recalled at one point he looked up to see that someone was pushing a small plane out onto the runway. A man clad only in shorts was standing nearby.

“I asked what the hell was going on, and the FBI agent said the hijackers had agreed to release the hostages if we would provide them with a pilot and a small plane and money,” Gladney recalled.

“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘And you are making preparations to do that?’”

The agent told him they were “getting ready, just in case.”

“I told him those two men could walk off that plane or they would leave it feet first,” Gladney remembered. “I was not going to do that. You should have seen the look on his (the FBI agent’s) face.”

Reflecting on this episode, Gladney added that he particularly resented the idea of “criminals participating in a criminal activity dictating to law enforcement. I wasn’t going to bend on it.”

The Feds had acceded to the hijackers’ demands in Philadelphia without resolving the situation, and he wasn’t about to do it in Brazoria County, he added.

Gladney was a sheriff who ruled his domain with an iron hand, whether dealing with lawbreakers or handling discipline in his own department. He was — and is — a plain-speaking man who leaves little doubt about his opinions or intentions.

He resented the federal agents’ attempts to make concessions to the hijackers and made no effort to disguise his disgust.

According to one news story, the FBI negotiator’s conciliatory efforts included a statement made about noon that day to the effect that fuel and new tires for the Boeing 727 would be provided if necessary.

Gladney’s unwillingness to compromise became increasingly obvious to the hijackers as the day wore on.

“The most gratifying thing that happened that day was their final request,” he said recently.

“They asked, ‘If we surrender, do we have to surrender to that tall fella with that big hat on?’

“I took that as a compliment,” Gladney said.

He told the FBI agent, “He don’t want no part of this sheriff. He can surrender to you. I would really rather not have him in my custody.”

The hijackers finally released the hostages, threw down their guns and gave themselves up to law enforcement officers about 4:30 p.m. By that time the temperature in the plane had reached about 130 degrees.

As the stewardesses ran to get into an FBI car, one of them looked directly at Gladney.

“You S.O.B.,” she yelled, apparently angry because her release had taken so long.

“You’d think she might have appreciated getting out of there,” Gladney said recently, shaking his head at the memory.

“Once the hijackers realized their demands weren’t going to be met, and saw that we were setting up lights around the field and were settling in for the night, they started thinking about their safety,” he explained.

With the most dangerous part of the situation resolved, reporters congregated outside Community Hospital hoping to get interviews and photographs of the stewardesses.

They found, however, that the ambulance from the airport was empty when it arrived at the hospital, and the driver told them, “The stewardesses went that way.” They had been taken to Houston by the FBI.

In a 1983 feature story, Bill Billingsley of The Brazorian wrote that it was apparently “the nervy co-pilot who sealed the doom of the two parking lot attendants turned hijackers when he banked the big plane sharply onto the runway.”

That maneuver “threw the gunmen off balance and gained enough time for himself and the flight engineer to jump to the ground,” Billingsley wrote.

He added, “And despite many people questioning their gallantry in leaving the stewardesses, they apparently followed standing orders of all airlines to remove themselves in any way possible because without pilots, hijackers are stuck wherever they land.”

The pilot who brought the plane down in Lake Jackson “probably couldn’t have chosen a more ideal place than the wooded surroundings” at the end of the small airport’s runway, Billingsley said.

After the air pirates were in custody, the next major difficulty was to get the Boeing 727 off the runway and back to an airport large enough to handle it. This involved several different problems.

The plane was out of fuel. Brazoria County had no facilities capable of refueling it. In addition, the tires had blown out on landing and would have to be replaced.

A safe takeoff from the short runway was theoretically possible, but admittedly tricky. An FBI spokesman told newsmen that he had talked with airline pilots about this, and they had told him they wouldn’t want to have to do it.

A representative of Boeing Aircraft Co., which builds the 727 planes, said this could be done if the plane was unloaded and carrying a minimum fuel load, and if allowances were made for natural obstructions and engine failure.

One additional factor emerged: The combination of a hot July day and the weight of the airliner had left deep ruts on the asphalt runway. The plane was actually sinking as the day wore on, officials said.

Preparations for takeoff used most of the next day, Friday, July 14. After replacing the shredded tires and damaged wheels, airline employees loaded the airliner’s fuel tanks with just enough fuel to get it back to Hobby Airport in Houston.

The seats were removed to lighten the load further, Gladney said recently. Even then, and with the plane’s engines revved to achieve maximum power, spectators said it looked as though it “barely made it” off the short runway. Vibrations from the three jet engines could be felt in downtown Lake Jackson.

Crowds continued to swarm around the airport until the big plane was out of sight, with the spectators marveling that it had actually lifted off safely.

Next Week: Henry Marcus tells what he learned from crew members a few weeks after the incident.

Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.

[weldertom]

Readers recall events of 1972 plane hijacking

By Marie Beth Jones

The Facts  

Published April 7, 2008

One of the neatest things about writing this column is the feedback I get from people who either remember the actual event or in cases where the event took place years before they were born want to tell the story as they heard it from a relative or friend.

The first episode of the series about the large commercial airliner landing at the Dow Airport brought an e-mail the following morning from Henry Marcus, who was a teenager at the time the plane landed.

Your article in The Facts about the 1972 landing of the hijacked airplane was interesting, Marcus wrote from Austin. Id like to tell you my version.

He goes on to explain that his information came from a visit a short time after the landing, when the co-pilot and flight engineer who flew the plane from Philadelphia paid a visit to Lake Jackson.

Three weeks after the landing, they came to thank the real hero, the flight instructor who risked his life to go out to the plane to drag the co-pilot to safety, Marcus wrote.

They were kind enough to include me. All I did was go to the end of the runway and get Mr. Beavers (flight engineer) in my truck and to the police station. By the way, you should have seen the look on the police dispatchers face (I think it was Mrs. Huffman) when we got there.

Henry then shares what he remembers of what the crew members told him about how they got to Lake Jackson.

While the hijackers were watching the passengers de-plane in Philadelphia, the pilot sneaked out the cockpit window. The co-pilot told the two hijackers that they had to have the pilot to fly the plane.

One of the hijackers calmly turned, shot Mr. Beavers, the flight engineer, and said to the co-pilot, Now do you think you can fly the plane?

He quickly agreed and they took off.

The hijackers wanted to go home, either to Jamaica or the Bahamas.

Since their English was poor, it took the co-pilot a while to explain that while Jamaica was on the map, it was actually three times the distance away, and there wasnt enough fuel.

So, the hijackers ordered the crew to fly out over the Atlantic/Caribbean, and where it landed it landed, so that if they died, then the crew died.

The flight crew worked out a plan to bank very, very softly over the southeastern United States. Fortunately, they knew that the southern United States was socked in with clouds, so the hijackers couldnt see that the plane was not over water.

When the plane descended near Houston, the clouds broke and the hijackers could see that they had been fooled somehow.

What transpired next was the most amazing thing with a plane that I had or will ever see.

At the moment the hijackers were looking out the cabin windows, the flight crew got the cockpit door locked. When the hijackers tried to break the door down, the co-pilot put the plane into a dive, causing zero gravity, negating the hijackers force against the door.

When the hijackers rammed the door, they simply bounced off. Then the co-pilot pulled out of the dive and flipped the wings twice, hoping to knock them out. It didnt. Only the stewardesses were hurt.

The crew meant to circle quickly and land at Surfside Beach.

When the two men came down to Lake Jackson (after the incident), we all went to the beach, and they realized that they would have run into Fishermans Wharf.

They had seen the jetties but somehow missed the wharf, and if they had landed there they would have killed themselves and everyone on or near the wharf. Luckily, they came back and bounced into the Lake Jackson airport.

They had no idea that the runway was only made for little planes. When they realized that they were making holes in the ground, they werent sure if the landing gear would collapse.

I was dropping off my brother Charles at what was then the Rec Center. Charles was actually the first one of several people to see the plane and kept hollering for everyone to look at it.

When the plane stopped, I went out to the end of the runway, as it was right by the City Dump road. Along came Mr. Beavers, bloody and torn up, yelling at me to turn the truck around and get him to the cops.

I did, worried the whole time that my Dad was going to kill me for turning his truck around in the brush.

The real hero in all of this was the flight instructor there at the airport. He went out to the plane and sat there with the co-pilot, who had broken many bones from landing wrong and from jumping out of the cockpit window.

As the co-pilot moaned, almost unconscious, the instructor had to cover his mouth since a hijacker came out of the plane to find him.

When the hijacker saw and heard the police car, he quickly went back to the plane. Then, the flight instructor put the co-pilot on a gurney and pulled him to safety.

Marcus said on their visit to Lake Jackson, the co-pilot told them the rest of the story, as to how the two men gave up, was pretty interesting.

He let us know that the hijackers finally got so tired and hot (the co-pilot had turned off the air conditioning again right before he jumped out), that they threatened to start shooting the stewardesses one by one, every 15 minutes until their demands were met.

The FBI countered that they were coming aboard in 15 minutes, shooting, and that the hijackers might shoot the stewardesses and/or the some of the agents, but that the agents were definitely going to kill the hijackers.

At 4 p.m., the hijackers surrendered.

Thats my recollection, Marcus wrote. It has been awhile. Hope this helps.

One other reader comment makes a correction to information about the plane.

Mike Sanders of Grand Rivers, Ky., e-mailed the paper to tell us that the aircraft was incorrectly reported in both the original news stories about the hijacking and in the Tales series as a 747.

The aircraft was actually a 727 or a 707, he said. Brazosport Facts photographs verify this. A 747 has a top notch on it, for an upstairs and a second row of windows.

Sanders said he still has clippings of the original story in case the pictures were not readily available here.

Another e-mail, this one from William Urban of West Columbia, also corrected the plane involved.

At the time of the hijacking, Urban was a prison guard at the Clemens Unit, he said, and the day the plane took off, I was there at the airport, and the plane that took off was a Boeing 727, not the 747.

Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.