The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner Read Free Book Online Page B

ahead. As the sun began to rise that morning, Leon Bearden became highly agitated by the endless delays. He commanded Flight 54’s captain to take off at once, punctuating his directive by firing a bullet between the co-pilot’s feet.
    But the trip to Havana lasted less than fifty yards. As the Boeing 707 pivoted toward the runway, a dozen federal agents opened fire with submachine guns, shredding the jet’s landing gear and destroying one of its engines. Now stripped of their only means of escape, the Beardens agreed to let an FBI negotiator come aboard to discuss a possible resolution to their predicament.
    But Leon Bearden had become too unhinged to strike a deal. “Do you see those policemen out there?” he screamed at the negotiator while gesturing wildly with his revolver. “They would as soon kill as not! They’d rather kill me. I would rather be killed myself than go to prison. I’d rather kill myself!”
    An instant after making this suicidal threat, Bearden heard acommotion in the main cabin. He glanced back to see the stewardesses sneaking out the plane’s rear exit.
    Before Bearden could do anything drastic, Gilman punched him in the ear with all his might, shattering a bone in his right hand in the process. As the hijacker crumpled to the floor, the FBI negotiator spun and tackled Cody, who had let down his guard while listening to his father’s rant. Within minutes the two Beardens were lying prone on the tarmac, hands and feet chained behind them as if they were hogs. The dozens of newspaper photographers and camera crews who had gathered around the plane documented their humiliation; the media instinctively grasped the appeal of alurid hijacking yarn.
    On the afternoon of August 4, the Senate Aviation Subcommittee convened an emergency hearing to address the rash of hijackings. A weary Leonard Gilman, his broken right hand heavily bandaged, testified about his heroism aboard Flight 54. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Najeeb Halaby, presented a six-point antihijacking plan that called for cockpit doors to be locked and for pilots to receive firearms training. A Justice Department official announced that his boss, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had authorized a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in “the actual, attempted, orplanned hijacking of aircraft.”
    The senators, meanwhile, decried their colleagues’ failure to make hijacking a crime back in 1958, a blunder that meant the Beardens could be prosecuted only for run-of-the-mill kidnapping. Senator A. S. Mike Monroney of Oklahoma vowed to rush through legislation that would make air piracy punishable by life imprisonment. But Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas pronounced that penalty too light. “When civilized nations begin hanging air pirates,” he said, “piracy will disappearfrom the air lanes.”
    In the midst of all this aggressive posturing, a senator asked the FAA’s Halaby if he and President Kennedy had discussed the possibility of requiring airlines to screen passengers—perhaps by searching carry-on bags, a tactic that likely would have prevented the Beardensfrom boarding Flight 54. But Halaby scoffed at the idea as wholly impractical: “Can you imagine the line that would form from the ticket counter in Miami if everyone had to submit to police inspections?”
    Satisfied by Halaby’s curt dismissal, the committee did notraise the issue again.
    Four days after the Senate hearing, a frustrated artist named Albert Cadon left his Manhattan apartment without saying goodbye to his wife. He surfaced a day later aboard a Pan Am jet bound for Guatemala City, holding a gun and demanding to be taken to Havana. Cadon told the crew that the hijacking was a protest against America’s failure to support Algeria’s National Liberation Front in its long and vicious war ofindependence against France. a
    One of his hometown tabloids, the
New York Daily Mirror
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