The one about the spear gun hijacking. Suicide Trigger warning On April 7th 1994 A disgruntled Fedex employee attempted to hijack and crash an airplane for mysterious reasons, this is the story of the flight crew that fought to survive the ordeal.
Wiki links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705
Suicide hotline: 800-273-8255
Loose episode transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back to Nightmare now! The show where we cover all the mortifying mysteries of this material plane and more. Again I’m thrilled people are checking out my little show so if you’re new we’re glad to have you! I got some feedback about screaming to much about analytics, noted, but I’m pretty logical and data oriented so all the listener graphs and location stuff is super interesting to me. For all you guys and gals that have reached out to be guests on future episodes, I’m super excited to have you and it’s gonna be a blast, but none of that can happen until I get a new computer. This laptop has a nasty habit of disconnecting from the microphone and keyboard. Man if you guys got to hear how much cursing I have to cut out just from technology issues alone this podcast would be rated NC-17 for sure. With all that said in hopefully less than a minute versus ten minutes of life updates and show new so let’s jump into the topic tonight.
Imagine if you will. You’ve ordered a product from amazon or some other online seller. You excitedly go to the seller website and get a fedex code to track your nightmare now merch. Man I should’ve delayed this episode until next year when everyone will be buying T shirts, It would have made it much more impactful. Like B Witched says though, cest la vie, I’m locked in now. Much to your abject horror, you see your package is delayed. You begin to fly off the handle because your stickers aren’t getting there until next tuesday. What lies behind that little red box that says shipping delay. Today we’re gonna take a look at one extreme, and completely true shipping delay that happened almost 28 years ago almost to the day. Today we’re learning about the ill fated federal express flight 705. This is a wild story that a lot of people don’t know about, especially if you’re my age or younger and you weren’t watching the news in 1994.
If you don’t know anything about this story, strap in, keep your belt buckled and strap in for some f**king turbulence, it’s gonna get bumpy. It was april 7th 1994. It was a cool morning in Memphis Tennessee, just under sixty degrees, and the skies were clear, UNTIL THEY WERE FILLED WITH BLOOD. Captain Dave Sanders, first officer Jim tucker, and flight engineer Andy Peterson were doing their pre flight checks for a routine fedex flight to San Jose, California, to drop off some mail or CD’s of Ace of Base’s the sign, the number one song for that day. I love checking out what the #1 song of days is to put stuff culturally in perspective. So while this HORRIFIC DISASTER is taking place in the sky, you have some jerkoff in jnco jeans and frosted tips jamming out to I saw the sign in his s**tty saturn S series on the ground below.
The crew has a last minute hop on, basically fedex airline employees could hitch a free ride on a plane going where they needed to go. This is before 9/11 so nobody really gave a crap about airport security yet, despite a litany of hijackings in the seventies and eighties. But even then nobody expected that sort of thing from an employee, disgruntled or otherwise. And Auburn Calloway, He was f**king disgruntled. Can you be gruntled? Is that just satisfied? Words are weird. Auburn Calloway had it all, and subsequently lost it all. He was a stanford graduate and a top navy pilot, and one of the first black men to ever do so. He had a wife and kids and by all accounts a promising career ahead of him. He transitioned out of the navy and went on to be a commercial pilot, and after that a flight engineer with fedex. Something he presumably saw as a slight downgrade each time, over these years his marriage crumbled and they split up. At the time of the incident Calloway was going to have to appear in an investigation for discrepancies in his flight time logs and likely lose his job. He was still sending money to his family and I guess he just saw the writing on the wall that, if this investigation went through, his professional career would be pretty much over. He’s going through his stuff, he hates his job and then he finds his way out. To secure his family’s future, to end his pain, to get back at the company he hates, all at once. His life insurance policy, weighing in at a hefty two and a half million dollars if he dies in an airline accident. Adjusted for today's economy that’s north of four and a half million dollars. Over the next few days he plans his attack, planning to be on flight 705 as the engineer with a man and much smaller woman pilot crew. In a stroke of luck for the original crew he was a part of, they were 1 minute over their allowable flight time. With just a little more of a headwind on their last flight the events of april 7th could have become one of the worst disasters in airline history.
Determined to follow through on the plan despite not being able to be on the crew, he takes the jumpseat I was talking about earlier. He wires over all the liquid money he can to his ex wife, packs his guitar case, leaves his will on his bed, and takes off for not a do or die scenario, but a do AND die plot of a f**king action movie.
Flash back to the actual crew boarding and doing their pre flight checks, The breaker on the cockpit voice recorder is tripped, that supplies power that lets it, well record voice in the cockpit. No awards for creativity but these things need to be straightforward. Calloway had gotten on early and popped this out, hoping it was missed in the pre-flight check, making it so there would be no audio evidence in the event of a crash. Luckily Andy Peterson caught it, twice. Yeah calloway snuck in and unplugged the breaker a second time and Peterson saw it again. Presumably acted like a skyrim guard, said it must be nothing and watched it for five seconds, satisfied it didn’t pop out and went back to the checklist. If Calloway tried that again, my understanding was that it would ground the plane, so he wasn’t gonna press his luck on that front.
Instead he would wait for takeoff to make his move. You can find the transcript of the whole flight, I’ll link it in the show notes, but at the beginning you have the usual cleared for takeoff stuff and the crew shooting the s**t together, seeing where each other lives ect. They see Calloway come into the cockpit, expecting him to just chat with them for a little bit of the flight and that’s when it hits them. Wham! Calloway had come in from the other room after opening his guitar case, he wasn’t here to play free bird, in the case he had four hammers, a knife and a f**king speargun. He comes in with two of the hammers and whacks Jim tucker so hard it smashes a baseball sized hole his skull and sends bone shards into his brain. He’s completely stunned out for the next 45 seconds or so. He can’t move or really react but he’s still conscious. Calloway is raining down attacks like he’s got the hammer in smash bros and whacks Peterson so hard his skull also fractures and seperates his temporal artery so he starts bleeding out right there and continues to do so for the rest of the quote “flight”. There’s a great documentary about this whole thing that’s available on youtube that includes a dramatization and everything. That's actually where I got most of the info for this show, but it shows all of this stuff going down. Check that out in the show notes. While Tucker is still dazed, Sanders and Peterson jump up to try and take control of the situation, Calloway runs back into the galley to grab his spear gun and screams that it’s a real gun and not to try anything fun or I’ll kill all of you!”
Even though the crew is already beaten and bloody, Peterson the engineer grabs the spear and tries to wrench control of it. It’s at this point tucker, still trapped in his seat starts to regain at least some of his movement but he’s still effectively paralyzed on his right side and completely disoriented. Tucker uses the only thing he can to fight back, confined to the seat himself, he uses the plane. He inches his one working arm up to flight controls and puts the plane into a climb. Keep in mind this isn’t a small snappy jet or a maneuverable biplane or something like that. This plane is a DC-10, almost 200 feet long and with a hundred sixty foot wingspan. If it were outfitted for passengers rather than mail it could seat almost 300 people. It’s not designed for any airshow antics. When the plane climbs suddenly it throws Calloway, Sanders and Peterson dozens of feet back into the wall in the galley of the plane.
Now s**t gets even crazier, The crew is fighting Calloway, it’s two on one but the odds aren’t really in their favor, I don’t think that I mentioned that Calloway is a f**king martial arts expert as well. The dude is basically a bond villain. Sanders and Peterson both are already beat the hell up and bleeding out after getting smashed with hammers. They really don’t stand much of a chance against the relatively unharmed Calloway. He intended to beat the crew to death with the hammers rather than just shoot everyone to make their injuries more consistent with a plane crash, for when authorities investigate the wreckage. Jim Tucker is still in the copilot’s seat and can’t really turn his head to look back there but he hears the brutal scuffle between the other three, he has no idea who’s winning or who’s even alive. Peterson and sanders are shouting for him to just put it on autopilot and get back there but he still can’t move out of his seat. He does the only thing he can and starts rolling the plane like he’s trying to get to the secret path in starfox 64. The plane is flying sideways now and everyone back there gets thrown into another wall. They’re all scrambling for the hammers and speargun. Then tucker rolls the plane back the other to a hundred and forty degrees, for the geometry challenged, plane go up people fall back, plane go to one side people fall to that side, plane go all the way back to the other side and almost upside down people get thrown and pinned against the ceiling like they’re in the hallway from inception except with more blood and hammers. After that Tucker slams the plane into a dive that sticks everyone to the back wall like they’re on a gravitron. They’re all thrashing around back there trying to gain control of the hammers. Everyone including Calloway had taken some heavy hits from the hammers back there. It looks like a hallway on the ishimura from dead space.
All three of them are covered in blood, the seats are ripped up, there’s papers and jackets and s**t flying around everywhere, there’s bloody foot and hand prints on the f**king ceiling and at this point nobody is clearly winning the brawl. When Tucker puts the plane into the dive there’s yet another problem. The plane is rapidly heading towards the ground, but far more rapidly than it should be, the planes aren’t supposed to go over 695 kilometers per hour but this thing is headed towards the ground at over 860 kilometers per hour. He realizes that the throttle on the plane is still on full power after takeoff. The wing elevators are shaking and close to coming off, the massive jet is almost supersonic but he’s only got one working hand so he has to let go of the yoke in order to get at the throttle and kill the engines. After this, coming out of the dive he manages to level the plane without the tail and elevators and stuff completely ripping off the fuselage and he’s finally able to start radioing in to air traffic controllers. All this happens within about a MINUTE of calloway first attack with the hammer. It’s extremely rapid and there’s a million things that could have gone wrong.
So he radios in and asks for armed intervention and ambulances with permission to land back at memphis. While he’s talking he flip flops the plane back and forth with a roll. After Peterson and Sanders seem to get the upper hand they yell at Tucker to throw that B***h on autopilot and get back here and help. That’s crazy I just imagine him going back there, struggling very much to do so because he’s effectively parlyzed on one side of his body and he gets back there and everyone just stops being a cloud of dust with fists and feet coming out of it like its some old school cartoon and they’re just like if you’re back here then who’s flying the plane? Turns out nobody was, the f**king gyros hadn’t stabilized after all that crazy aerobatics so he’s just like screw it and I guess ghost rides the whip? Like just kicks it in neutral and hopes the autopilot takes over. When Tucker gets back there he finds the other two have pinned and disarmed Calloway and they agree to have Dave Sanders land the plane because he’s the captain and that’s protocol. The whole thing seems pretty damn far from protocol but I’m not a pilot. Sanders hands Tucker the spear and they keep Calloway pinned down while Peterson is still, severely bleeding from his head and kinda flopped on Calloway to help keep him down.
Sanders gets back in the pilot's seat and on the radio, the air traffic controllers just heard radio silence during this exchange so they thought the hijacker took over or something. Tucker can barely feel the spear in his hand and says if you move I’ll kill ya. Kind of a nice poetic moment in the chaos since that’s what Calloway said only moments before when he first pulled out the speargun in the cockpit.
Complicating things further, Sanders doesn’t have his GLASSES on and his eyes are full of blood so they almost miss the turn for the airport and in all the commotion. Calloway chooses right then to start fighting again and almost gets back to his feet until Peterson slams him with the hammer multiple times in the head and he drops. Air traffic control is like you’re all set up with a swat team and an ambulance, do you have the situation under control? And I love this, Sanders, over the sound of screaming and hammers and airplane warning beeps is just like “we appear to have it under control.” Calloway is trying to push people’s eyes out, he’s biting, he’s fighting like an animal and screaming. Sanders throws on the autopilot again and goes back fully intending to kill calloway. The other two tell him it’s under control, but in doing the auto pilot he approaches the airport too fast.
I don’t know how many ways I can say they’re not out of the woods yet, here’s another complication, but here’s another one. The plane is too heavy to land on the smaller runway they’ve been allocated since because physics. As simply put as I can, it has too much fuel, fuel that would normally be used up on the way to San Jose. No comment on whether or not it can melt steel. Because it’s too heavy and the approach is too fast it will take brakes applied over a longer runway to bring the plane to a stop, they can’t use that runway. If all three crew members were in the cockpit in a scenario like this the flight engineer could dump the fuel to make it weigh less.
Obviously it’s only Sanders, the other two are guarding and subduing Calloway. OF COURSE, the fuel dump switch is all the way on the other side of the cockpit and he can't step away from the steering controls. Because of this and the speed they need to hit another runway at ninety degrees to the first one. He needs to take a ninety degree turn and then pull it around, BACK 180 degrees and level it out to hit the new runway. Miraculously Sanders is able to pull off this maneuver and land the plane quote “safely”.
They burst the doors and EMTs and SWAT are able to get onto the plane. They take everyone to a nearby hospital where they’re treated for their injuries. Investigators find a suicide note on the plane telling calloway’s family he loves them and he’s doing it for them and all that lunatic bulls**t but a plan seems to come into focus, with the overfueled jetliner, and the crew dead, Calloway could have flown the plane right into fedex headquarters to take half the company with him. A disaster the likes of which was unimaginable, except for maybe in that tom clancy book that predicted a plane crashing into the world trade center. remember, this is ‘94 nine eleven hadn’t happened yet, but that’s for another episode.
Auburn Calloway was sentenced to life in prison for attempted air piracy. Jim Tucker, Andy Peterson and Dave Sanders were all awarded a gold medal for heroism but sadly none of them were deemed fit to fly after the incident due to the injuries they sustained. There’s interviews with all three of them in the doc, and they just wistfully look into the distance like, every time I see a plane I get sad and wonder where it’s going. s**t is heartbreaking. Everyone survived though yayyy! That’s probably why a lot of people haven’t heard of this hijacking story. That and a certain football player involved in a notable car chase just months later kind of eclipsed most of the news in 1994.
One thing I don’t get and I can’t find an answer to is why the hell calloway brought a suicide note with him while at the same time going through a complex plan to make it look accidental, disabling the recorder, killing everyone with hammers so they wouldn’t suspect foul play, crashing the plane, but then you just send the money to your ex wife, have an incriminating suicide note and spend a week prior to crashing a plane getting your affairs in order. I guess most of that is circumstantial evidence but what the heck man.
That’s pretty much all I got for today everyone, Throw me a rating and review if you’ve got the time. Smashing the 5 star button builds muscle mass. I’d say sweet dreams, but we all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now. See ya next week!