On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in the air. That is how a 27-year-old man named John Divivo walked onto a DC-9 carrying a .38 revolver.

By the time the aircraft landed at Logan, the first officer was dying, the captain had been shot in both arms, and the United States had its first hijacking in which someone other than the hijacker was killed. Within weeks, American airports began screening passengers.

A post from @theaviationcircle retells the story well. A few details are off, and one moment it leaves out, the first officer turning the gun on the hijacker, is the heart of it.

“I Want to See the Captain”

About twenty minutes after takeoff, as the stewardesses worked the aisle collecting fares, Divivo came up short of money. When stewardess Sandy Saltzer pointed it out, he showed her the revolver.

In the cockpit he told Captain Robert Wilbur Jr. to fly east, out over the Atlantic, and to tell him when they were two or three minutes from running out of fuel. Hijackings were almost routine in those years, and nearly all of them ended in Havana. This one had no destination. Divivo wanted the aircraft to go into the sea.

The Shooting

Wilbur kept talking, and the aircraft eventually turned back toward Boston. Soon afterwards Divivo opened fire. First Officer James Hartley was hit first; the bullet entered his upper back and tore his aorta. Wilbur was shot in both arms.

Hartley should not have been able to move. He pulled himself up anyway, lunged at Divivo, wrenched the revolver out of his hand and shot him before collapsing. Accounts differ on whether he fired two shots or three. Wounded and bleeding, Wilbur flew the DC-9 on toward Logan with one arm on the throttles and the other on the controls, and put the gun down on the console.

Near the runway, Divivo came round and moved again. Wilbur picked up the revolver in his bloodied right hand and struck him twice on the head with the flat of it. Then he landed the aircraft.

He said nothing about his own wounds. The DC-9 touched down safely and State Police boarded immediately. James Hartley was pronounced dead at Massachusetts General Hospital at 8:35 p.m. All 68 passengers and the other four crew members survived.

Correcting the Record

The Instagram version gets the essentials right, and its passenger count, crew names and ages match the record. Three details need tightening. Hartley was not hit in the chest; the bullet entered his upper back. The post has him disarming Divivo, but leaves out that he then shot the hijacker, which is why Divivo was down for most of the rest of the flight. And the post says Divivo shoved the control column forward to crash the aircraft himself; the fuller reconstruction published by the Boston Globe in 2020 describes him reviving near the runway and Wilbur beating him back with the gun, and we have not found a primary account of a struggle for the controls.

Cosa è successo dopo?

Divivo survived his wounds and was charged with murder. On 31 October 1970, before his trial, guards at Boston’s Charles Street Jail found him hanged in his cell. Investigators had found occult books and a home-made tombstone in his luggage; as a teenager he had survived shooting himself in the head.

Wilbur needed several operations and spent 28 days in hospital, but recovered full use of his arms. Transportation Secretary John Volpe visited him in hospital with an award. He flew for Eastern for another two decades and later for Saudi Arabian Airlines until he retired at 60.

The Hijacking That Brought Screening

Two days after the flight, on 19 March 1970, Volpe opened hearings on airline security. Within weeks, US airports began the first screening of passengers, and in September 1970 President Nixon announced a wider anti-hijacking programme that included sky marshals. It still took until January 1973 for the Federal Aviation Administration to require every passenger and every carry-on bag to be screened. The effect was dramatic: according to the Boston Globe, 124 hijacking incidents in the United States between 1968 and 1972 fell to one in 1973.

Every walk through a metal detector at a US airport traces back, in part, to a DC-9 over New England on St Patrick’s Day 1970, and to a first officer who kept fighting with a torn aorta.

Sources: Boston Globe Magazine, “You don’t understand, Captain, he has a gun” (March 2020) and accompanying video; Wikipedia (Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320); AvioRadar (ATC transcript excerpts); The History Guy; Wikimedia Commons.