In 1972, one of the strangest moments in aviation history unfolded on the tarmac of Miami International Airport. An FBI agent, wearing nothing but his underwear, approached a hijacked Southern Airways DC-9 with a suitcase containing $1,000,000 in cash. This bizarre delivery was not a prank or a movie scene, it was a real-life demand from a desperate hijacker, and the FBI had no choice but to comply.
Delta Air Lines Flight 841 was an aircraft hijacking that took place beginning on July 31, 1972, on a flight originally from Detroit to Miami. There were 7 crew and 94 passengers on board the Douglas DC-8 for the flight from Detroit to Miami. Members of the Black Liberation Army took over the aircraft in flight using weapons smuggled on board, including a handgun hidden inside a Bible with its pages cut out to form a cavity. None of the hostages were killed during the hijacking.
Five hijackers who had boarded with three children took over the aircraft. It flew to Miami as originally scheduled, where the 86 passenger hostages were released. The aircraft was then flown to Boston, where they picked up a flight engineer who was qualified to fly the plane overseas.
Working with FBI agents on-site, Boston Delta airport maintenance foreman Ronald S. Fudge was chosen to refuel the plane and deliver the flight engineer to the plane. He also delivered a bag containing the $1 million ransom and other bags containing provisions requested by the hijackers, including cigarettes, apples, and ham and cheese sandwiches. After refueling and taking on the engineer and provisions, the plane was dispatched to the runway and flew to Algeria. Algerian authorities seized the aircraft and ransom which were returned to the U.S. with the crew hostages, but the hijackers were released after a few days.
On the evening of Wednesday, August 2, 1972, at a hurried 10-minute news conference after the DC-8’s completion of the 11,500 miles (18,500 km) trip in Atlanta, the captain said he realized the aircraft was being hijacked when he left the cockpit to go to the lavatory and noticed a man aiming a gun at a stewardess. One of the hijackers held a stewardess, Jamye Mays of Pell City, Alabama, at gunpoint throughout the incident. The stewardess had been with the airline less than two weeks. “They did it as a threat when they thought their instructions were not going to be carried out,” the captain said.
The crew had an overnight stay in Barcelona, Spain, after leaving Algeria. In addition to the ransom, a Delta spokesman said the trip cost $21,600 for fuel and salaries for the crew. Delta identified the crew members as Captain William Harold May, First Officer D.L. Henderson, and R.R. Kubal, and stewardesses Shirley Ann Morgan, Sherril Elsie Ross, Jamye Mays, and Leanne Marie Arnfield.
Four of the five hijackers were captured in Paris on May 26, 1976, and tried by the French courts. The remaining hijacker, George Wright, who had dressed as a priest during the hijacking, was arrested on September 26, 2011, in Sintra, Portugal. Wright was an accomplice in a 1962 armed robbery and homicide who had escaped from a prison in New Jersey before joining in the hijacking.
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