Meet the air pirates: The incredible story of the first airplane hijacking in history
In 1948 a flight between Macau and Hong Kong was taken over in an incident that the China Mail would call “unparalleled in the history of aviation.”
A resurfaced report from the China Mail newspaper has revealed what is thought to be the first ever instance of an airplane hijacking. A lot has changed since the first “air pirates” snatched a Consolidated Model 28 Catalina seaplane in the harbor city of Macau.
Flying is now a heavily regulated, deeply organized process but back in 1942 things were a lot looser. Taking a flight “was like taking a bus,” explains Dan Porat, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Passengers could buy their tickets as they boarded the plane and the Macau Air Transport Company was commonly used by business travelers commuting between Portuguese-controlled Macao to British-controlled Hong Kong.
The 20-minute flight was rarely an eventful one, until July 16 1948 when one of the airplanes failed to arrive in Hong Kong as expected. The alarm was raised and officials began frantically searching the water between Macau and Hong Kong.
They found only one survivor, a 24-year-old rice farmer name Wong Yu. He initially claimed that the plane had exploded in mid-air and that he had managed to grab a life jacket as it descended, but inconsistencies in his story forced police to dig a little deeper.
The plane - Miss Macao - had set off with two pilots, one flight attendant and 24 passengers on board. However four of the passengers were not intending to land in Hong Kong, they were planning to hijack to aircraft and fly off into the sunset. The story is covered by Luis Andrade de Sa in his book ‘Aviation in Macau: One Hundred Years of Adventure.’
Andrade de Sa explains that Wong Yu was one of the four hijackers who staged the attack. They had hoped to overpower the pilots and captain the plane, but American captain Dale Cramer had refused to cede the controls. Hijakers then shot both pilots but Cramer’s body landed on the controls and sent the airplane down into the South China Sea. Wong was the only survivor and the entirety of this account came from him. So how did police get the story out of him?
CNN reports that Chinese police sent dozens of undercover agents into the hospital, posing as patients, with the aim of befriending Wong. Eventually they got Wong to recount exactly what had happened, revealing that the hijackers had planned to fly the plane to a remote town in the Guangdong province in southern China so they could hold the wealthy passengers ransom. Needless to say, it did not work.
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