CRESTVIEW — Many former Crestview students have exciting lives away from their hometowns. Ann Rivera, then Ann Kelly, once had an adventure more thrilling than most.
An airliner on which she was a flight attendant got hijacked to Cuba in 1975.
FULFILLING A DREAM
“I had always wanted to be a flight attendant, so after doing a couple years of (child services) casework, I decided to go for the gusto and got hired by Eastern (Airlines),” she said.
“It was basically because I wanted to travel and see the world without having to go into the military. Being a flight attendant was a little more glamorous in that day.”
During her 13 years at Eastern, Kelly worked through the ranks, beginning as a flight attendant, then an instructor, a supervisor, then a manager. But her biggest thrill — and not in a good way — came during a routine flight from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Miami.
Kelly realized one of the passengers stood out.
“He had a big boom box around his neck,” she said. “He didn’t look quite right. As soon as the flight took off, I saw him go forward to the flight attendant. She picked up the phone and called the cockpit and I knew exactly what was going on.
“She told the pilot he had someone onboard who said he had a bomb and he wanted to go to Cuba. I got up and intervened because I had trained flight attendants in hijacking, or skyjacking, as we called it.”
Thus began the longest three-hours of her life.
'THIS IS IT'
From her training, Kelly knew she had to earn the skyjacker’s trust.
“One of the things we were trained to do was you always try to stay between him and the cockpit, and generally it’s better for one of the females to intervene and try to win him over,” she said.
Cuba wasn’t really the skyjacker’s preferred destination.
“He wanted to go to Russia and save the Biafra children,” Kelly said. “He had pictures of poor children pinned on his shirt. He wanted to go to Russia and take care of the poor starving children.”
As Kelly earned his trust, she tried to learn details of the boom box bomb.
“By this time, I had agreed to marry him, have his children and take care of him the rest of his life,” she said.
The hijacking was foiled by Fidel Castro, who refused the plane permission to touch down in Cuba, so they turned toward Miami. By then, the pilot felt the boom box didn’t really contain a bomb, though the hijacker had a knife.
“The captain came back and decided this was it,” Kelly recalled. “He grabbed the skyjacker’s wrist and got the knife out of his hand. Meanwhile, I was more concerned with the potential bomb.
“A knife — that is just going to put your eye out. I grabbed the boom box and gave it to a flight attendant and told her lock it in the back lav. I then asked passengers for their ties and we proceeded to tie him (the hijacker) down.”
Without further incident, the flight landed in Miami, and Kelly’s experience became incorporated into Federal Aviation Administration and Eastern Airlines hijacking training.
ANN THE MODEL
While helping thwart a skyjacking was the highlight of her commercial aviation career, she did have another. She was asked to be a model in a print ad with former astronaut Frank Borman, who was then Eastern Airlines' president.
While the ad again spread her fame around the country, Kelly counts the hijacking as a life-defining moment.
“It was quite an experience, and it was the one thing you learn about yourself in a situation like that, which was I can be calm in the midst of crisis,” Kelly said.
“You really don’t know that about yourself.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Crestview native recalls hijacking, modeling at Eastern Airlines