![]() ![]() Calloway, ending the life-altering flight that would lead to Calloway’s life sentence. Tucker eventually returned the plane back to its regular position and called the control center to set up an ambulance and “armed intervention” for when they landed, per the transcript.īy then, the other two crew members needed help from the wounded Tucker to control Calloway.Ī paramedic then entered the aircraft and put Calloway in handcuffs, Circuit Judge David A. “What Jim did with that plane, I still can’t believe.” “It saved our lives,” Sanders said of Tucker’s flying, according to the report. ![]() As Tucker took the plane to its limit, he was losing control over part of his body due to the skull fracture, said the 2007 report from The Commercial Appeal. Hirschman said no DC-10 has ever flown faster than the one in Flight 705. “(Tucker) literally had it on its backside, and to pull that off structurally, I don’t think anybody’s ever done that since,” Lombardo said. Tucker tipped the plane’s nose up, sending the fighters back, before turning the plane almost upside-down and sending it into a deep dive, as shown in a 2018 simulation of the flight. He then performed daring aerial maneuvers with the DC-10 to throw Calloway off balance. Daring maneuvers throw off attackerĪs Peterson and Sanders wrestled to get Calloway under control, Tucker alerted the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center to what was happening. “Andy (Peterson) grabs the speargun, which I really admire him for doing, and pushes (Calloway) out the crew door, and the fight is on in the back,” said Mark Lombardo, a 727 airplane captain at FedEx then who had flown with Calloway before. So Peterson and Sanders fought Calloway instead. “They were in a fight for their lives from the moment they were attacked." “It wasn’t a situation in which talking and trying to de-escalate the situation was going to help,” Hirschman said. But the crew knew immediately their situation was different, Hirschman said. “Sit down, sit down, get back in your seat, this is a real gun, I’ll kill ya,” Calloway said, per the transcript.Īirline pilots are trained for hijacking scenarios, Hirschman said, but the training is typically focused on de-escalating the situation and reasoning with the would-be hijacker. Peterson and Sanders got out of their seats. The crew saw a brief reprieve as Calloway left the cockpit to retrieve his spear gun. “He’s going to kill us,” Sanders said after Calloway began, according to the transcript. Takeoff for the DC-10 proceeded as normal, with a relaxed conversation flowing among crew members, according to a cockpit recording transcript from .Ĭalloway’s attack changed that. He bludgeoned the crew members with a hammer, Hirschman said, which could deal debilitating damage while mimicking the appearance of crash injuries. The hammer's blow gave Tucker a skull fracture. “Pilots used that ability for work matters and personal matters every single day, so the idea of a company pilot getting on an airplane to go to the West Coast would have been totally normal,” Hirschman said. Tucker, Sanders and Peterson all assumed Calloway was just an employee hitching a ride, a “jump-seater” in industry parlance. “He was motivated to do maximum harm to FedEx.” 'He’s going to kill us'Ĭalloway entered the plane before the crew did on April 7, his guitar case filled with hammers, a knife and a spear gun, said a 2014 report from The Commercial Appeal. ![]() “I personally think that was (Calloway's) ultimate goal, but he's the only one who knows,” said Dave Hirschman, author of "Hijacked: The True Story of the Heroes of Flight 705" and a former reporter for The Commercial Appeal. His planned destination may have been FedEx’s headquarters. It also led to life in prison for FedEx flight engineer Auburn Calloway, whose aim was to take over the plane and crash it, so his family could cash out on his life insurance policy, The Commercial Appeal reported in 2007. David Sanders, first officer Jim Tucker and flight engineer Andy Peterson. What happened on that flight has been the subject of a TV episode, its own book and high honors for its crew: Capt. It never reached its intended destination, instead managing an emergency landing back at Memphis International Airport after some deft airmanship. On Thursday, it flew from Memphis to Montreal, according to Plane Finder Data.īut the plane took a much more notorious journey in April 7, 1994, a flight from Memphis to San Jose, California. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 involved first flew in 1985, per flight records, and is a frequent presence at the FedEx World Hub at the Memphis International Airport. Twenty-five years after three crew members of Federal Express Flight 705 withstood an attempted hijacking, the plane containing that chaotic fight for survival still flies for FedEx regularly.
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