“I am 93. I grew up on a farm in Leesburg, GA. I was the smallest one in my class and I joined the Army at age 17. Five members of my family served in WWII. Everyone made it home but my father, he died 20 days before he was supposed to come home.

I flew an airplane last month on my 93rd birthday. I haven’t flown in twenty-something years. It felt like old times. The first time I made a beautiful takeoff, circled the field and landed with what we used to call in the airline industry a ‘grease job.’ Just greased it on the runway. The second time was terrible. The third time I flew up and down the coast between Fairhope and Point Clear. The landing was incredible, but not quite a grease job. It all came back. That’s my soul. I am grateful to have the mentality and skills to still fly.
I wanted to be an aviator since my aunt took me for an airplane ride at the county fair when I was a toddler. I couldn’t afford flying lessons. After the war, I took the last money I had left and bought an old surplus WWII plane. I taught myself to fly it. I was hired hauling bags and taking tickets for the Southern Airlines when they only had one plane. I became a pilot and 24 years later I was vice president of flight operations for Southern Airlines.

I was vice president of flight operations at Southern when one of our planes was hijacked. I was at a party and got a call that a plane had been hijacked out of Birmingham. This was the first real hijacking in the US. They didn’t have airport security like we have today and this event started TSA airport screenings. They told the Captain to fly North. They said they had been mistreated by Detroit and were holding the passengers hostage and demanding $10 million from Detroit.

Toronto was the only place they could land. I took off with FBI agents and was worried we couldn’t come up with $1 million on a Friday night, much less $10 million. Who has that on a Friday night?
We both landed in Ontario. Captain Hodge recognized my tail number on a plane we had commandeered. I landed first and we deplaned. The FBI agents had no authority in Canada. The hijacked plane stayed on the runway with engines running and they demanded fuel. We had to do it. They refueled, got spooked and took off again, headed South, presumably to Cuba. I knew they needed to get fuel again. They took off and we flew in their wake to Knoxville.
We had an airplane in Chicago. We got the Chicago city council to call a meeting at midnight. They agreed to loan us $2 million. It was all they had, but it looked like $10 million when they put it in bags. We knew the hijackers were running short of food and water and we told them we had the money.

We flew into the Knoxville airport. It looked like the 4th of July because there were so many cars, people wanted to see the excitement. Understandably, the hijackers got spooked. They needed fuel and chose Chattanooga. I had to teach the FBI how to take the plane. I knew some tricks about how to disable the engines without being seen. We knew there could be some shooting and we had to accept that responsibility. They were getting paranoid. When they stopped in Chattanooga for fuel, they made the fuel truck driver strip down to his underwear. They were hungry and we had ordered them 40-50 boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken. We loaded it through the windows on the escape hatches on either side for the machine. They wouldn’t open the doors. All of us were now becoming sleep deprived and under a lot of pressure. We were in touch with a psychiatrist, Dr. Hubbard, who did research in criminal minds, including hijackers. He created a profile and I used that to understand what was going on in their heads, They were tired and wanted pep pills. We gave them placebos and the damn $2 million and let them go.
They landed in Cuba. They thought they had $10 million and could be multimillionaires there. The officials told them they could land in Cuba, but couldn’t have the money. They decided they would take off and go to Europe. That was dumb. That plane couldn’t hold enough fuel to get to Europe. They left Cuba with the $2 million and headed across the Atlantic.

I had just gotten into a tub of hot water when I got the call that they were headed this way again. I got out of the tub and put my uniform back on. It had been 30 hours since any of us slept. We conned them into thinking if they landed in Savannah we would have a Pathfinder airplane that would lead them across the ocean and mid-air refuel. They fell for that. Then they passed over the Orlando airport with the long runway and clear visibility. They said to land there, so the captain landed in Orlando and the fun began.

All of the airplanes were following the action and had all of the exits blocked so I couldn’t get into the terminal. We were in someone else’s territory. FBI agents argued who was in charge. We lost two hours of valuable time while they argued. The FBI agents were told to approach the plane from behind and stay out of sight. I was supposed to disable the engines. Then the agents could make an assault on the plane. We finally got to the ramp and I raced to position. We heard gunfire. The hijackers kept the engines running the whole time and we told them they needed oil. We had them by the nose and a little mind control. Then one of the agents fired to flatten the tire. That set it off. The hijackers snatched the co-pilot out of the seat and shot him. As they pulled the trigger, the co-pilot dove between the seats and the bullet hit him in the shoulder.

The captain knew the tires had been shot flat. The hijackers told him to take off. He went down a 10,000-foot runway with flat tires. The engine ingested the rubber and could have failed at any minute. As he approached the fence, he said, ‘God, I’ve done all I can do, it is in your hands.’ They cleared the fence with no tires and headed back to Cubs. They landed on the rims in the same place they left half a day earlier. The four hijackers were taken into custody. I flew down there to repair and get our airplane back. I talked to the head of the Cuban military and told him I would take them back to the U.S. He said, ‘No Senor, at the present I can assure you they are very uncomfortable. They are in a box quatro by quatro by quatro.’ They did not become the millionaires they wanted to be. I just wanted to get some sleep. The next day we worked in the blazing sun and hoped we could get it going again. It held its pressure when we took off. There were terrible thunderstorms in Atlanta where we wanted to land but we were out of fuel and had to land anyway. They took us into a closed hangar and locked the door behind us so customs and immigration could come aboard. The FBI agents wanted to talk, but I had been flying for 40 hours without sleep. I didn’t want to talk until I was ready to talk. I walked out on them, went home and went to bed. And that is the beginning of TSA as we know it.”