In 1968, Saint John made aviation history as the starting point for Canada’s first skyjacking: an Air Canada Vickers Viscount passenger plane headed for Toronto. This was the first of several acts of air piracy during the golden age of skyjacking in Canada. We begin our episode by discussing the golden age of commercial aviation in Canada, when passenger travel was associated with glamour, passenger comfort and convenience. Relatively expensive compared to later decades, air travel from the late 1950s to the early 1970s was not a mass phenomenon and the typical passenger was a male business executive. Female flight attendants, who tended to be young, were specially trained to look after passengers. Security was minimal; there was no screening of passengers and baggage; departure lounges were not controlled spaces and airports did not have protective fencing. Canada, with its low levels of crime, political violence and handgun ownership, seemed even less worried than the United States about airline security.
The episode next examines the golden age of skyjacking, a global phenomenon that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was heavily reported in the media and made an impact in pop culture in terms of humour, editorial cartoons, books and movies. Dozens of U.S.-based flights were hijacked, with many skyjackers demanding to be taken to Havana. Many on the political left regarded Cuba under the Castro regime to be a socialist haven from American capitalism, racism and imperialism. The skyjacker was often viewed as a new type of social rebel produced by the tensions of the 1960s, but not all of them were politically motivated. Some were fleeing the law, others demanded ransoms, others were thrill seekers or hungry for publicity and a few were mentally ill. Airlines and governments resisted implementing expensive and intrusive security measures until actual violence threatened aircraft, passengers and crews. Canada experienced several skyjackings, only one of which was successful.
We move on to the background of the skyjacker of Air Canada Flight 303, a young African American from Texas, Charles L. Beasley, who had been involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Dallas. By the mid-1960s SNCC, which had taken part in the freedom struggles in the U.S. South, was morphing into an all-Black organization tied to the anti-Vietnam War and Black Power movements. Beasley’s name appeared in secret files of the FBI, which was monitoring political activities by Black activists. According to a later interview, Beasley became radicalized after the assassination of Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. Whatever the reason, he took part in an armed bank robbery in the small Texas community of Ladonia in August of 1968 with at least two other men but escaped arrest. Wanted by the FBI, he fled to Canada. The episode ends with Mark and Greg speculating why and how Beasley ended up in Canada, and more specifically, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which he left in the early hours of Sept. 11, 1968, carrying an .22 calibre revolver and heading for the Saint John airport.
Sources:
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, With a New
Introduction and Epilogue by the Author (Harvard University Press, 1995).
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party the American Indian Movement (Black Classic Press, 2022).
Bret Joel Edwards, “Bumpy Landing: Airports and the Making of Jet Age Canada,” (University of Toronto, PhD thesis, 2017).
Nina Hadaway, The Golden Age of Air Travel (Shire: 2013)
David G. Hubbard, The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy (Collier Books, 1972)
Brendan I. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (Crown 2014).
Bob Mitchell, In Plane Sight: Before 9/11:An Untold Story (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2019).
Peter Piggott, Air Canada: The History (Dundurn Press, 2014).
D. Porat, “Plane Hijackings between Cuba and the United States and the Opportunity for
Diplomacy (1958–1973),” The Historical Journal, vol. 67 (3) (2024):561-582
J.M. Sharp, “Canada and the Hijacking of Aircraft,” Manitoba Law Journal, Vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 451-64
Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
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