Jerry Summers
When Southern Airways Flight 49 landed at Chattanooga’s Lovell Field on November 10, 1972, it was one stop on a bizarre hijacking plot by three individuals, Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson Jr., that had started earlier in Birmingham, Alabama at 7:20 p.m.
The Douglas DC-9 originally was scheduled to fly from Memphis, Tennessee to Miami, Florida with intermediate stops in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama and Orlando.
Armed with handguns and hand grenades, the unorganized hijackers required the pilots to fly to multiple sites in the United States and Canada.
After making a ransom demand for $10 million in cash and threatening to crash the plane into the nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the plane landed at Chattanooga to pick up a reduced amount of $2.5 million.
With the money, 31 passengers and three crew members, the jet headed to Havana, Cuba.
Unfortunately, dictator Fidel Castro did not welcome them with open arms and did not accept them into his country.
After leaving Cuba, additional problems happened to the hijackers. They originally wanted to fly to an alleged safe haven of Algeria, but the plane’s limited range could not cross the ocean to that destination.
Upon returning to America, a stop was made to refuel at the Orlando Jetport at McCoy Air Force Base in Florida.
The FBI shot out two of the craft's four main tires and it was forced to fly back to Havana.
Landing again at that venue resulted in the hijackers being removed at gunpoint.
Put on trial the three individuals served eight years in a Cuban prison and were then extradited back to the United States where they received additional 20-25-year sentences.
Although the Chattanooga stop was a small part of the incident that lasted over 30 hours, traveled to three countries and four thousand miles, it had (and still does) a lasting effect on air travel.
As a result of the hijackers’ threat to blow up the nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge, this led to the regulations that require all United States airline passengers to be physically screened, beginning on January 5, 1973.
Cuba did return the airplane crew, passengers and ransom money to the United States but development of the security procedures and inconvenience to the traveling public remains to this day!
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Jerry Summers
(If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact Mr. Summers at jsummers@summersfirm.com)