Aviation: The Skyjackers

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For growing numbers of airline passengers, flights almost anywhere in the Southern U.S. have become dubious adventures in serendipity. The unsought —and usually unwanted—dividend is a side trip to Havana.

Since 1961, 15 aircraft have been hijacked in U.S. skies and forced to land in Cuba. This year alone, gunmen have commandeered nine U.S. planes; all but one made compulsory stopovers at Havana. The problem has grown so epidemic that one airline servicing Miami and other Southern cities in the U.S. has decided to equip pilots with approach charts for Havana's Jose Marti Airport and written instructions on dealing with hijackers ("Do as they say").

Last week in Los Angeles, a young Cuban who identified himself as R. Hernandez boarded National Airlines Flight 1064 bound for Miami. After a stop at Houston, the Cuban confronted Stewardess Kathleen Dickinson with a pistol and a handkerchief-wrapped object that he indicated was a grenade. "Fidel ordered me back to Havana, dead or alive," he said in Spanish. Though Pilot Sidney Oliver convinced the hijacker of the need for a refueling stop at New Orleans, lawmen there could not attempt to retake the plane without risking the lives of the 57 passengers and seven crew members aboard. Only when Hernandez was safely on the ground in Havana did he reveal, with some glee, that his "grenade" was a bottle of Old Spice after-shave lotion. Cuban authorities, who have never let on whether they regard the hijackings as a welcome embarrassment for the U.S. or a simple nuisance for Cuba, carted Hernandez off. They released the pilot and crew to return the DC-8 to Miami, then sent the passengers along aboard a DC-6 chartered by the State Department.

Electronic Frisk. Virtually nothing has been done thus far to try to thwart skyjackers. During the 1961 outbreak of such incidents, the Federal Aviation Administration authorized airline crews to carry guns, although both the companies and the pilots generally opposed the idea. A trip to Cuba, they reason, is preferable to a mid-air gun battle. Locking the pilot's cabin during flight hardly helps, since a gunman can always seize a stewardess as a hostage and force her to relay instructions to the pilot over the intercom. Searching each passenger as he steps through the boarding gates has been rejected as both time-consuming and unsettling. One aerospace manufacturer, however, plans to demonstrate next month a $100 detection device that uses highly sensitive magnetized film to signal the presence of heavy metal objects. Unlike presently available, dangerous and rarely used X-ray detection systems, the new device would set up a magnetic field to spot a metal weapon; it could be graduated to ignore lighter objects, such as a passenger's key ring.

The skyjackers have been a motley assortment. One airline pilot dismisses them all as "nuts and bolters," but in addition to the borderline psychopaths there have been fugitives from justice, exhibitionist hippies, and several Cubans who may have been Castro agents hitching a ride home. Last March, two Cuban exiles who had left their families on the island grew homesick and forced a DC-8 to Havana. While Castro has granted asylum to all, there is no evidence that he has really welcomed any of them.