Aviation: The 6,900-Mile Skyjack

With all the casual calm of a Grand Canyon-on-your-left announcement, Pilot Donald Cook's voice came over the public-address system: "There's a man here who wants to go somewhere, and he's just chartered himself an airplane." The 39 passengers on TWA Flight 85, over Fresno and bound for San Francisco, suddenly realized that they had joined the growing ranks of the skyjacked. It was not simply the 55th case of skyjacking in 1969; it turned out to be the longest and oddest pirated flight in aviation history.

One man, armed with a folding-stock M-l carbine, changed Flight 85 from a routine run into a fantastic flying hegira that led all the way across the U.S. and then over the Atlantic to a bizarre conclusion in Rome. All through its strange progress, the changing track of Flight 85 compelled the attention of the earthbound: the FBI, air-traffic controllers, and—quite understandably —President Forwood Wiser of TWA, who sat out the 17-hour ordeal with other top company executives at the airline's Manhattan headquarters. Said a Federal Aviation Agency official: "That flight was handled as if it were Air Force One." The general public of two continents hung on Flight 85's every move, fascinated by the airborne drama. Once again it was evident that the awesome machines of the jet age can become even more fragile hostages than the hapless crews themselves.

The skyjacker himself was an especially unlikely sort. A young (20 last week), pleasant-looking Marine veteran of Viet Nam, Lance Corporal Rafael Minichiello was absent without leave from Camp Pendleton, Calif. The Italian-born lad thought the Corps had cheated him of $200 in pay. To get even, he had broken into a PX and was facing a special court-martial when he quit Pendleton.

Warning Shot. After Flight 85 left Los Angeles, Stewardess Tanya Novacoff saw Minichiello fiddling with something under his seat. "Oh, I'm putting together a fishing rod," he explained. The fishing rod was the carbine, and a few minutes later Stewardess Charlene Delmonico was marching up to the cockpit in front of Minichiello with the weapon in her back. "I mean business," said Minichiello.

Once inside the cockpit, Minichiello held the carbine at the flight engineer's head and ordered Pilot Cook to head for New York. Cook laconically radioed the FAA control center in Oakland: "Rerouting to change to New York on account of hijacking." FBI agents hastened to Kennedy Airport, but in the meantime Cook persuaded the skyjacker to let him put down at Denver to refuel and allow the passengers and three of the four stewardesses to disembark. Fearful of making a dangerous situation worse, ground personnel did not intervene. After the Denver stop, the red and white jet took off again. Minichiello ordered Cook to stop at the end of a refueling apron far from the Kennedy Airport terminal buildings. FBI agents approached the plane, but Cook warned them away; at TWA's request, they did not open fire.