Until the slim-winged Eastern Air Lines Electra was 20 minutes northwest of Miami one sunbright morning last week, the dark, bushy-browed little man in the front seat seemed to be brooding silently on the dangers of flight. Then he came to life. He beckoned to Stewardess Joan ("Casey") Jones and sent her for more cream for his coffee. When Casey returned, the passenger was gone. Across the aisle, another passenger pointed to the cockpit door. Casey rattled the handle, kicked the door lightly, could not budge it. She put the waxed cup on the floor and said: "When he comes out, tell him here is his cream."
Up forward in the cockpit, Wilfredo Roman Oquendo, 36, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had made an abrupt transformation from the shy Miami hotel waiter who had meekly bought a ticket to Tampa. Suddenly he was the same snarling Cuban secret policeman he had been in pre-Batista days; suddenly he was fulfilling his role as a hotheaded member of Fidel Castro's July 26 Movement. He pointed a big, Luger-type pistol at Pilot William E. Buchanan. 40, and snapped: "Turn this airplane around." Unruffled, Buchanan banked the $3,500,000 ship into a wide turn calculated to alert the radar watch on the ground. "All right, now," Buchanan drawled, "what heading do you want me to fly?" "Two hundred ten degrees," said the slim air pirate. As Buchanan set his course, he knew he was flying toward Cuba.
On the other side of the door, the 32 passengers knew only that something was wrong. "I know they don't move the sun, and it was on the wrong side of the plane," recalled a nervous lady. At Miami International airport, FAA radar observers were aware of trouble, too. Efforts to raise the plane by radio failed. An eavesdropping Pan American pilot on a training flight slid his jet close by to identify the Electra. From SAC's Homestead Air Force Base came a fully armed F-102 to hover watchfully 5,000 ft. above the hijacked plane.
Hotheaded Kids. In the cockpit, Oquendo braced himself against the closed door, tapped Flight Engineer Philip Knudsen menacingly with his gun whenever anyone reached for a switch without explanation. Pilot Buchanan nursed a double worry: the Cuban air force might attack because he was out of the normal Havana approach corridor ("They have some hot airplanes there with hotheaded kids flying them," he reported later), and the gunman might start shooting if any passengers tried to storm the door. He got Oquendo's permission to make one laconic announcement on the plane's public-address system: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a passenger that wants to go to Cuba, so we're taking him. Please stay in your seats and offer no resistance." As they approached Havana, the escorting F-102 turned back. Electra Copilot John Yandell got the pirate's approval to ask Key West for the Havana airport frequencies, and managed to slip in a quick warning: "This is an emergency. We are being forced at gunpoint to fly to Cuba."