Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cockpit. Captain Byron Rickards got the message instantly, as the plane's two stewardesses edged through the door followed closely by two gunmen. The elder of the two pistol toters, a wiry, balding man, held his .38 against the head of Stewardess Lois Carnagey and announced to the pilot: "We are going to take this plane to Cuba. Alter your course 45° to the south...
...meekly bought a ticket to Tampa. Suddenly he was the same snarling Cuban secret policeman he had been in pre-Batista days; suddenly he was fulfilling his role as a hotheaded member of Fidel Castro's July 26 Movement. He pointed a big, Luger-type pistol at Pilot William E. Buchanan. 40, and snapped: "Turn this airplane around." Unruffled, Buchanan banked the $3,500,000 ship into a wide turn calculated to alert the radar watch on the ground. "All right, now," Buchanan drawled, "what heading do you want me to fly?" "Two hundred ten degrees," said the slim...
...wrong. "I know they don't move the sun, and it was on the wrong side of the plane," recalled a nervous lady. At Miami International airport, FAA radar observers were aware of trouble, too. Efforts to raise the plane by radio failed. An eavesdropping Pan American pilot on a training flight slid his jet close by to identify the Electra. From SAC's Homestead Air Force Base came a fully armed F-102 to hover watchfully 5,000 ft. above the hijacked plane...
Hotheaded Kids. In the cockpit, Oquendo braced himself against the closed door, tapped Flight Engineer Philip Knudsen menacingly with his gun whenever anyone reached for a switch without explanation. Pilot Buchanan nursed a double worry: the Cuban air force might attack because he was out of the normal Havana approach corridor ("They have some hot airplanes there with hotheaded kids flying them," he reported later), and the gunman might start shooting if any passengers tried to storm the door. He got Oquendo's permission to make one laconic announcement on the plane's public-address system: "Ladies...
...brisk, self-assured publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, which he took over from his late father at 30; of a heart attack; while cruising on Tennessee's Old Hickory lake. A printer's devil at eight and the Air Transport Command's youngest World War II pilot at 18, influential Democrat Evans backed Lyndon Johnson for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, was recently appointed to the Johnson-led President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity...