Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  Ossie Watts, meanwhile, ran to the aid of Constable Sandeman, bleeding beneath the Fokker. Both policeman and hijacker were raced to Alice Springs hospital where Constable Sandeman underwent emergency surgery for four gunshot wounds. ‘Mr Nelson’—with bullet wounds to the left leg, right shoulder and the head—died that night.

  The saga, however, was far from over. Although police were able to rapidly confirm that Nelson wasn’t his real name, no one came forward to identify him and months passed while his body lay refrigerated in the Alice Springs morgue. Finally, almost six months later, in May 1973, after a team of investigative reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald visited Alice Springs and published a story and a picture of the man, a Sydney woman rang the Herald, identifying him as Miloslav Hrabinec, who had migrated to Australia from Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. Two of Hrabinec’s friends and his Sydney dentist then flew to Alice Springs to positively identify the body.

  While little was ever confirmed of Hrabinec’s motives for the hijack there was a report that he had suffered a financial loss due to a housing scam. Constable Sandeman’s injuries prevented him from ever returning to the Northern Territory Police Force, but he was later awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. He died in a car crash in Queensland in 1995.

  Kaye Goreham continued as a flight attendant but retired several years after the event and raised a family. As fate would have it, she should not even have been on Flight 232 that November day. Another Ansett flight attendant had called in sick and she’d substituted for her.

  Although it took place more than a decade after the TAA Electra incident near Brisbane in 1960, the Alice Springs crime is often wrongly identified as Australia’s first hijacking. Perhaps in media files and in the public’s mind the gunfight to the death on the Alice Springs runway had left a more lasting impression. But while it wasn’t the first, it certainly wasn’t to be the last.

  Seven years later, at a crowded Sydney airport, another hijack attempt would occur, also ending in a death.

  Ground crews work on one of the B-24 Liberator bombers used by the RAAF’s top secret 200 Flight at Leyburn, near Toowoomba during the latter months of the war against Japan. Note the lack of suitable cover or hard standing for the aircraft under the primitive conditions at Leyburn.

  Trans-Australia Airlines Captain Ray Vuillermin (right) and his First Officer Tony Burgess, whose Fokker Friendship arrived in Darwin on Christmas Day 1974 after the city had been devastated by Cyclone Tracy. Their F-27 was one of the first to leave with evacuees. (Photo courtesy Ray Vuillermin)

  The old Berrima hospital in the Northern Territory from the air. Qantas took over the hospital for staff and transiting passengers as it reopened Darwin to the world following the war. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Z Special Unit commandos atop the structure used to prepare them for their air drops into enemy territory. The soldier in the centre has positioned himself on a slide similar to those used to exit the aircraft. (Photo courtesy RAAF)

  A rare, very low flypast by a commercial airliner, beautifully captured by photographer Peter Ralph as TAA’s first Viscount arrives at Melbourne’s Essendon airport after its delivery flight from the UK in October 1954. The excitement of the new arrival was short lived however when the Viscount crashed during a training exercise at Victoria’s Mangalore airport several weeks later, killing three of the crew on board. (Photo courtesy Peter Ralph)

  The final resting place of the RAAF Caribou at Porgera, Papua New Guinea after attempting to land at the wrong airfield. (Photo courtesy RAAF)

  ‘Customer meal delivery’ Papua New Guinea style. A Qantas captain poses for the camera as he feeds a cow through the window of his DC-3. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Rhesus monkeys being offloaded from a Qantas aircraft after a flight from Asia in the 1950s. The monkeys were not the easiest cargo to deal with, forcing crews to wear overalls to protect them from anything the monkeys could lay their hands on! (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Pindiu airstrip, Papua New Guinea, typical of the challenges which had to be handled by pilots operating in that country. Note the terrain provides for an approach from only one direction and, with rising ground at the far end, leaves no opportunity for a ‘go around’. (Photo courtesy Dave Wiltshire)

  Roy (Nug) Hibben photographed alongside a Meteor jet fighter while serving with the RAAF’s No 77 Squadron in Korea. Hibben would recall a near-death experience when he failed to tighten his cockpit harness before carrying out an inverted low level flypast at the RAAF base at Kimpo, near Seoul. (Photo courtesy Benny Hibben)

  Qantas pilots try some light humour with this sign alongside the airstrip at Embi in Papua New Guinea. The makeshift sign reads: ‘Qantas Empire Airways Ltd Embi Branch. Booking office and Lounge.’ (Photo courtesy Hartley Shannon collection)

  The humour extends to the Embi ‘hostess’. These were the days before political correctness entered the lexicon! (Photo courtesy Hartley Shannon collection)

  A Qantas Lockheed Constellation at Darwin. Qantas had to virtually start from scratch to reintroduce international services through a bomb ravaged Darwin after World War Two. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  At Wynyard in Tasmania, the planes and trains had to take it in turns on the runway as the train track ran across it.

  Double Sunrise Catalina: Qantas Catalina Altair Star being prepared for departure at Nedlands, near Perth. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Two members of a UK parliamentary delegation, Baroness Dr Edith Summerskill and Mr J Harris with Qantas captain J.A.R Furze about to board Rigel Star at Nedlands on a Double Sunrise service to Ceylon in July 1944. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Captain Hugh Birch (fourth from left) and his garlanded crew on the arrival of the Catalina survey flight to Tahiti, via Noumea, Fiji and Tonga in July 1950, a flight which laid the foundation for commercial aviation between Australia and her Pacific neighbours. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  A smiling Captain Hugh Birch in his ‘office’ aboard the Catalina Island Chieftain. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  A spectacular photograph of the damage caused by Cyclone Tracy at Darwin airport. Few aircraft survived undamaged. (Photo courtesy News Limited)

  Laurie Crowley (right) pictured in his Crowley Airways hangar at Lae, Papua New Guinea in the 1950s. Behind him is the Curtiss Robin he was flying when he crashed on takeoff from one of New Guinea’s dangerous airfields. (Photo courtesy Betty Crowley)

  Qantas Darwin airport manager Peter Snelling on one of the motorcycles the airline airlifted into Darwin after Cyclone Tracy. The motorcycles provided vital transport for Snelling and the airline’s Darwin manager Ian Burns-Woods in the hectic days of the Darwin airlift. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  Darwin residents walk to a TAA Boeing 727 to be evacuated from the city following Cyclone Tracy. Thousands were flown out within days in a massive airlift involving civil and military aircraft.

  A rainy welcome at Qantas’s Mascot Jet Base on the arrival of the record breaking nonstop London Sydney Boeing 747-400 flight in August 1989. (Photo courtesy Qantas)

  The wreckage of the Connellan Airways complex at Alice Springs in January 1977 after the airborne murder/suicide which left five people dead and others seriously injured. (Photo courtesy Kelvin Hawthorn)

  Ansett Airlines’ Boeing 747 on its nose on Mascot’s main runway after its nose wheel failed to lock down, October 1994. (Photo courtesy Bob Smith Aussieairliners.net)

  Flight steward Esme Qazim and Captain Grahame Mackelmann pictured after receiving their awards for ‘conspicuous courage in the face of grave peril’. Ms Qazim knocked the armed hijacker to the floor where he was finally overpowered.

  The nose wheel of the Pan Am Boeing 747 wedged firmly in the soil after over-running the western end of Sydney’s east-west runway in July 1971.

  With Captain Ken Davenport at the controls, the Qantas 747-300 drops to three hundred feet in a spectacular opening to the Oshkosh Air Show in the United States in the early 1980s, an altitude which didn’t i
mpress Australian aviation authorities. Davenport would claim he had not been advised he had only been cleared for a five hundred feet flypast.

  10

  ‘I’ll blow this aeroplane up’: you, me and everyone else.’

  Twenty-two-year-old Canberra nurse Suzanne Chisholm was looking forward to attending her brother’s wedding in New Zealand when she arrived at Mascot airport late on the morning of 4 April 1979. She was in the departures area and had offered to assist another woman who appeared to be struggling with her luggage when she was suddenly grabbed from behind and a knife was pressed against her throat.

  Italian migrant Domenico Speranza was about to set off a four-hour hijack drama which would threaten the lives not only of Chisholm and a group of police officers trying to rescue her and disarm him, but create the danger of an explosion which could blow a Boeing 747 apart and extensively damage Sydney’s international terminal.

  In front of stunned onlookers, Speranza dragged the terrified nurse across the terminal and pushed her through the Customs barrier at the departure level. As several Customs officers began to approach, Speranza shouted: ‘Stay back or I will kill her.’

  As they backed away Speranza continued to half push, half drag Chisholm along the concourse to the departure lounge at Gate 7, where Pan American’s Boeing 747 Special Performance aeroplane had parked after arriving from Los Angeles less than an hour earlier. Only a few cleaners preparing the flight for its departure later that afternoon were on the 747 and they quickly ran for a rear door when they saw Speranza and his hostage come aboard, his knife still at her throat.

  By now, alerted by the Customs officers, Commonwealth Police Chief Inspector John Burrows was on his way. Burrows, a former London policeman who had played a prominent role in the arrest of the notorious Kray brothers some years before, was part of a Commonwealth police contingent stationed at the airport and responsible for safety and security on Commonwealth property.

  Burrows immediately began a conversation with Speranza in an attempt to have him release Chisholm, but Speranza repeatedly refused, continuing to hold the knife against his captive. Burrows could see blood on Chisholm’s throat. He told Speranza he would leave the aircraft and find a doctor to treat Chisholm’s wound.

  After Burrows left, Speranza, by now in a highly agitated state, told Chisholm that this would be the first time a hijacking had occurred in Sydney and he expected it to be in all the newspapers. He said he had a bomb which he claimed ‘would blow up a hundred people’, showing her a gold-coloured beer can with a 15-centimetre wick protruding from the top.

  When Burrows returned and resumed negotiating, Speranza began to explain that he no longer liked living in Australia, had been out of work and unable to find a job and he wanted to go to Russia via Rome, where he wished to talk to the Pope. Negotiations between the two continued until, carefully choosing his moment, Burrows lunged at Speranza and grabbed his right hand, forcing the hijacker to loosen his grip on Chisholm. As Burrows struggled with Speranza he shouted to Chisholm: ‘Run!’

  Chisholm needed no further encouragement and raced through the aircraft door into the departure lounge where she was met by other police. Speranza continued to refuse Burrows’ requests to leave the aircraft and at one stage, noticing police gathered at the door of the 747, shouted at them: ‘This is a bomb, get off the aircraft or I’ll blow everything up.’

  Meanwhile a hand-picked team of NSW police was beginning to arrive on the scene. Unlike in later years, there existed no permanently established NSW Police SWOS team in 1979. Rather, specially trained police would be quickly called in to bring their skills together to handle the type of situation now occurring at Mascot.

  Along with Burrows, the police team now included Detective Sergeant Nelson Chad, from the Criminal Investigation Branch, who had been trained in hostage negotiations, Detective Sergeant Don Worsley, who was from the Homicide Squad, Detective Senior Constables Bill Duff, Harry Allen and Brian Harding from the Armed Hold-up Squad, and Aldo Lorenzutta, an Italian-speaking member of the Fraud Squad.

  While Lorenzutta began to open a conversation with Speranza other police were on their way to his home in Fairfield where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law. What they found there only added to their concerns. In his bedroom were a large number of 12-gauge shotgun cartridges which had been cut open and their powder and shot removed, along with rolls of masking tape, plastic tubing and two empty KB beer cans. Police gathered up the evidence and rushed back to the airport where an inspection by ballistics experts confirmed that if the contents of Speranza’s bomb were ignited they had the potential to light fuel in the aircraft tanks immediately below where he was sitting and destroy the aircraft, along with a large part of the terminal. The news of the authenticity of the bomb convinced the police they needed to act quickly to disarm Speranza, who now had the beer can bomb in one hand and his knife and a match in the other.

  During his negotiations with the hijacker, Lorenzutta also noticed a cartridge-type box with a wick protruding from the top lying on the floor near Speranza’s feet. By now Speranza was becoming increasingly distressed and irrational, at one stage holding up a live match, saying to the policemen: ‘If you love your children, don’t come near me or I will blow this plane up, me, you and everybody else.’

  Then he demanded bread to eat, at the same time demanding Lorenzutta locate the crew of the aircraft so they could leave the country.

  While Lorenzutta left the aircraft to find the bread, Chad and the other detectives manoeuvred one of the airport fire hoses to just outside the door of the aircraft. By now the police team had decided that the members of the Special Weapons Squad would attempt to disarm Speranza. Their plan was to rush the hijacker, at the same time hitting him with a burst of water in the hope they could douse any attempt to light the fuse on the bomb.

  Lorenzutta was to resume negotiations and alert the others when he judged the timing was right to overpower Speranza. Chad and his colleagues, all armed with .38 revolvers, stood just outside the door of the aircraft, ready to move forward when Lorenzutta gave the signal. Lorenzutta, on the other hand, was now ‘armed’ with his two loaves of bread. He threw the first loaf, which landed on the row of seats in front of Speranza. Then he threw the second, which landed in the aisle near the hijacker, and he watched closely as Speranza stood up as if to move to retrieve the bread. Seizing the opportunity Lorenzutta shouted: ‘Now!’

  With that, Chad, Harding and Allen stormed aboard, Chad directing a blast of water which hit the hijacker in the face. As Harding moved towards him, revolver at the ready, Speranza half turned to avoid the stream of water and shouted, ‘I kill you!’ still trying to strike a match and ignite the bomb.

  Harding fired. The bullet hit Speranza in the left arm, but he continued to try to light the match. Harding fired a second time, hitting the hijacker on the left side of his forehead. As Speranza slumped back onto a seat one of the policemen secured the bomb, along with a second explosive device on the floor of the aircraft. Within minutes Speranza was being treated by doctors and was on his way to South Sydney hospital and later transferred to Prince Henry hospital where he underwent surgery for his head wound; however, he failed to respond and died later that night.

  Speranza’s sister would later tell police that, following injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident, her brother had become increasingly disturbed, claiming he should have been awarded damages as a result of the accident. She said for several days prior to the Pan Am incident he had acted strangely, refused to speak to her and when asked what was the matter told her he ‘had something to do’ and to ‘mind her own business’.

  Forensic examination of the KB can and the second package, a cartridge box, would reveal both were packed with gunpowder and shot, with the KB can also containing a quantity of sawn-off screwdriver blades. The full potential of the threat to the aircraft would be demonstrated some weeks later when—watched by the City Coroner, police, media representatives and Pan
Am’s Director of Public Relations, Ted Porter—explosives experts would place the bombs in a motor vehicle at Malabar’s Anzac Rifle Range and detonate them. Porter watched as the bomb wrecked the vehicle and recalls:

  We were standing some way back from it all on sloping ground when the roof of the car went up and destroyed the vehicle.

  In the middle of the explosion we heard a ‘twang’ behind us. One of the screwdriver heads inside the bomb had fortunately passed between all of us and embedded itself in the passenger door of one of the press vehicles.

  As for the Pan Am flight, maintenance crews replaced several bloodstained seats and it left for San Francisco later the same day. Nurse Chisholm also made it to Auckland that day, although a little later than she had originally planned.

  To show their appreciation, Pam Am hosted five of the police officers involved and their wives on an all-expenses-paid first-class trip around the world. Ironically, one of their main stopovers was Rome. Ted Porter gratefully accepted a ‘direction’ from his Pan American boss, Mike Merlini, to act as their escort.

  But Australia’s anti-hijacking teams wouldn’t be idle for long. Just two months later there would be another attempt, this time with a Trans-Australia Airlines jet as the target. The air route between Coolangatta and Brisbane on Australia’s east coast is one of the nation’s shortest sectors. It’s a tight, twenty-minute flight into the mix of other aircraft operating within the busy Brisbane airport control area and, for pilots in charge of a fast-moving jet like a Douglas DC-9, it demands full concentration.