American Flight 119 St. Louis to Tulsa
D.B. Cooper’s exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation. What’s less known is that it inspired imitators. None were more daring than the hijacker of American Airlines Flight 119.
Explore the golden age of skyjacking in John Wigger’s The Hijacking of American Flight 119: How D.B. Cooper Inspired a Skyjacking Craze and the FBI’s Battle to Stop It.
The man walked across the tarmac toward the Boeing 727 carrying a briefcase containing the thirty-dollar wig, a pair of rubber gloves, a smoke grenade, and two guns — a Spitfire machine gun with the stock and front grip removed and eleven inches cut off the barrel, making it compact enough to fit in the briefcase, and a small-caliber pistol. It was Friday, June 23, 1972, just after two p.m. and about eighty degrees, but not particularly humid for St. Louis, with a light breeze. He had paid seventy dollars for the round-trip ticket to Tulsa and back, under the name “Robert Wilson.” As was almost always the case in the era before metal detectors and heightened security, he had walked through the terminal and directly to his gate without stopping. No one asked to see what he was carrying.
He boarded the plane through the main cabin door and took a middle seat toward the back in row 24, on the left side, in front of the galley. To the stewardesses, there was nothing about him that seemed unusual. Flight 119 had left LaGuardia Airport in New York at 12:50 p.m., bound for Los Angeles, with stops in St. Louis, Tulsa, and Phoenix.
The man was twenty-eight but looked younger. He had a boyish grin and the sort of boisterous personality that went with growing up in a large Irish Catholic family. Neighbors would later describe him as “clean- cut.”
“The man was twenty- eight but looked younger. Neighbors would later describe him as ‘clean- cut’.”
They left St. Louis at 2:35 p.m. It was only a fifty-eight-minute flight from wheels up to landing. He still had a choice to make, but time was running out. If he just sat there and did nothing, like any other passenger, no one would ever know the difference. Friends back in Detroit had urged him not to go through with his plans. But he had already invested $1,500 in the scheme, all his available cash. He was behind on his mortgage. He needed the money. Jerry Stewart had the aisle seat next to his. He owned a clothing store in Tulsa and was on his way home. For the first half hour of the flight, Stewart tried to engage the man, who was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, but he seemed preoccupied.
“Are you going to Tulsa?” Stewart asked.
“Yes,” the man said, without elaborating.
In fact, he was about to make the most fateful decision of his life. Damn. You’ve got to pump up your nuts here, he thought. You’ve got to do it now or forget about it forever.
Still, he hesitated until the plane was nearly to Tulsa. When the pilot announced that they were starting their final descent and would be on the ground in fifteen minutes, he turned to Stewart.
“Where is the men’s room at?” he asked.
“Around the corner,” Stewart said, motioning toward the back of the plane.
In the lavatory, the man opened his briefcase and put on the wig and rubber gloves. He took out the machine gun and pulled back the bolt, careful not to let it slip and fire a round. Stepping out of the restroom, he stood at the back of the plane. And waited.
For what seemed like several minutes, nothing happened. He stood in the aisle, gun held across his chest, waving his hand, waiting for someone to notice. This is fucked up, he thought as the surreal silence stretched on. Finally, a stewardess, Jane Furlong, looked up and saw him as she walked down the aisle collecting glasses.
“Don’t hurt anybody,” she said, once she was close enough for him to hear.
John Wigger is Professor of History at the University of Missouri. He is the author of PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire , and American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists. He grew up flying with his father and was an avid aerobatic pilot.
