Original subtitles

FedEx flight 705...

Positive rate...

Gear up please.

A routine trip from Memphis, Tennessee

to San Jose, California.

Little do the crew know they will soon have to defend themselves

against a determined attack intended to kill them all.

Flight 705 will never reach its destination.

We've had an attempt to take over...

Investigators will uncover a meticulous plan

and a desperate motive.

3000.

We're not getting any oxygen.

We have the terrain alarm.

We are in an emergency.

It's April 1994.

A FedEx cargo plane is on its way to California.

It's a perfect day for flying.

- Altimeters. - Nines and twos here.

But behind the cockpit, in the galley area

a disaster is about to unfold.

The pilots of FedEx flight 705 are seconds away

from an unprecedented situation.

God Almighty!

Centre? Centre? Emergency!

He's had an attempted takeover?

We need an ambulance and uh we need armed intervention.

April 7, 1994.

Worldwide headquarters of Federal Express

in Memphis, Tennessee.

Servicing 171 countries,

the company delivers over 2 million packages per day,

and works to a tight schedule.

Flying conditions are perfect at the Memphis airport.

Fedex flight 705 to San Jose, California

is preparing to depart with a three-man crew.

Has the afternoon flight to San Jose got any jump seaters on it?

Not at all?

42-year-old Auburn Calloway is a flight engineer.

He hopes to hitch a ride on flight 705 for pressing personal reasons.

Thanks.

Employees have the privilege of free rides,

they are known as "jump seaters".

39-year-old flight engineer, Andy Peterson,

is the first of the flight crew to arrive on the plane.

- Andy Peterson. - Auburn Calloway.

He is surprised to find Auburn Calloway on board.

My first thought was well, scheduling has gotten...

Has also called someone else out for the flight

and now we got two engineers.

So, I said hey to him and then asked him if he was,

uh, gonna be riding out to San Jose with us

and he said he was, that he was gonna ride the jump seat out.

Peterson, a 5-year flyer with FedEx,

finds something unusual during his preflight check.

The breaker switch of the cockpit voice recorder

or CVR is in the off position.

Puzzled, Peterson resets it.

The CVR records all in-flight voice communications.

It is a crucial tool for investigating air disasters.

No large commercial airliner is allowed to fly without one.

The cockpit voice, circuit breaker, it had popped out

which means the power's off to the cockpit voice recorder.

So, I had never seen that before and I thought,

well, that's kinda weird.

49-year-old pilot David Sanders

and 42-year-old co-pilot James Tucker

are next to board and prepare for departure.

Do you mind if I hop a ride with you guys to California?

No, not at all.

I don't see any problems today, everything looks good.

Do you play guitar?

I play at it.

He was very cool, calm, collected,

nothing indicating anything was amiss.

Actually noticed there was a guitar case

off to the right in front of the 9g net.

But I couldn't wait to get in the cockpit and start going

through cockpit checks because we had a lot to do.

But something was amiss.

They didn't know it, but Calloway had originally been

scheduled to be the flight engineer on this flight.

However, he and his crew had exceeded their flying hours

by just one minute the previous day, so they'd been replaced.

But Calloway was determined to make flight 705 no matter what.

I think she'll fly.

All the nuts and bolts are there.

When I came back out, on the airplane

and went back up to the cockpit, I noticed that

that circuit breaker had popped out again.

So, I reset it and decided that I would see

if it would stay in

instead of calling maintenance at that time.

That I'd just wait to see if it popped back out,

that I would call maintenance because that is a no-go item.

If the CVR is turned off

there will be no audio record of the events aboard flight 705.

Do you want to fly this leg of the trip

or do you prefer the return trip?

You never know when you're gonna get another chance.

I met Jim Tucker that afternoon.

Jim had been with the company for 10 years,

in fact, he was an instructor in the DC10.

Andy Peterson and I had had a trip together,

in fact, we flew to Paris one time.

The crew is flying together for the first time.

Both Tucker and Sanders are ex-navy.

Sanders has been with FedEx for 20 years.

James Tucker - who has a wife and three children at home,

has been with the company for 10 years.

None of the crew know Calloway or his reasons

for being on this flight.

Express 0705 heavy runway 27 cleared for take-off.

Express 705 cleared for take-off.

Lights if you want them, I mean clocks if you want them,

lights are coming on,

we'll get the vertical speed wheel here in a minute.

- How's the checklist look? - All right.

Before take off is complete.

Your airplane.

Set standard power, please, before they change their mind.

Power is set.

80 knots.

That checks?

V1, rotate...

Positive rate.

Gear up, please.

FedEx flight 705 is airborne and westward bound.

The weather to California is clear

and if all goes as planned,

they'll be back home within 10 hours.

But, back in the cargo area,

Auburn Calloway is launching a different plan,

a plan he's been shaping and reshaping for several days.

Like the brilliant chess player he is,

Calloway has thought out all his moves.

Being bounced from the crew of flight 705 today

was an unexpected glitch, but nothing he can't cope with.

At his home that morning,

Calloway already had to make a small adjustment to his plans.

The flight bag he'd planned to take with him on his journey is in for repairs.

So instead he packs a guitar case.

As a company employee he is unlikely to be searched,

and a guitar case seems innocent enough.

Here you have a man who made some accomplishments

that no other African-American had ever made.

Calloway graduated from Stanford University in 1974.

He became a top navy flier, then a commercial pilot.

But his five years at FedEx have been as a flight engineer.

He was highly intelligent, a driven person,

to accomplish goals.

And had before him a...

an opportunity of a tremendously positive career.

He was married and had children and family

and it just seemed as though he was almost part of the, uh,

true American dream just about,

the American family.

Before leaving for the airport,

Calloway puts some important documents on his bed.

Among them, his last will and testament.

FedEx flight 705 is several minutes outside of Memphis,

still climbing and passing through 5800 metres.

Jim Tucker is hand-flying the airplane,

using control wheel steering mode

and enjoying the clear afternoon skies.

A couple of metres away sits Auburn Calloway,

behind him lie frustrated expectations of a brilliant career,

and a marriage that ended in tears.

After take-off is complete.

Calloway has a terrifying plan.

His guitar case is packed with several hammers and a spear gun.

Out of sight of the crew, he gets his weapons ready.

To be successful Calloway will have to act quickly.

Speed and strength will be critical.

Calloway is a former navy pilot and a martial arts expert,

so speed and strength come as part of the package.

The, uh, original plan was to take out his original crew,

which would only have been two individuals.

One was a female.

Much smaller than the crew that he wound up facing

on flight 705.

No, I live in Fisherville.

Fisherville, great spot.

I had the cockpit door locked open

and I noticed that Calloway was walking up into the cockpit.

I just caught him out of the corner of my eye and basically saw his,

you know, his arm coming up. And I thought, well,

he's just coming up to sit and talk with us for a while.

Excruciating pain, blinding pain.

Ah so much in fact that I never lost consciousness

but I lost useful consciousness for at least 45 seconds.

A blow to the head will rattle the brain,

it will shake it enough that it,

the electrical connections, momentarily, are not working.

And it could be anywhere from a complete, irretrievable

loss of consciousness to simply a stun.

Or to what he describes as a period of time

where he was somewhat aware of what was going on

but could not respond to it.

I was slumped back like this and he looked,

I remember right in my eyes as he passed over.

It was almost kinda like well the lights are on but there's nobody home here.

This guy is out of action so I'll move on to the next person.

The crew is in shock and confused.

What I saw was simply a face and his eyes,

and an object coming down at me.

I didn't discern any emotion or hate or anger,

I just saw a threat and I didn't really know what the threat was.

It's so shocking and for a crew member who is

a pilot in uniform to attack another pilot

is unheard of in the airline industry.

Although terribly injured,

Peterson and Tucker are still alive.

Get up, get him!

Calloway hurriedly retreats out of the cockpit.

Unaware of each other's injuries the crew starts to mobilize.

Calloway has a back-up plan.

The spear gun stashed outside the cockpit is a deadly weapon.

Sit down.

Sit down! Get back to your seats.

This is a real gun and I'll kill you!

There was a loud ringing in my ear and I was a little unbalanced,

but I saw the spear gun and I thought, well,

the only thing I can do is try to grab it.

So, I grabbed the spear.

It sticks out of the spear gun about, four inches or so.

So, I grabbed it right behind the barbs

and tried to hang onto it real tight.

Tucker does something that Calloway is not expecting.

He pulls back the yoke and puts the plane into a sudden 15-degree climb.

It throws the struggling men out of the cockpit

into the galley behind.

I had already figured out that what I had in my hands

was probably one of the best weapons available

and that was the aircraft itself.

Tucker has not been just a navy pilot

but a combat instructor flying A-4s.

His fighter pilot experience would prove invaluable

in the next few minutes.

I was looking at this whole situation

as if it was an air combat maneuvering situation.

Get him!

We're taught in the navy, in the fighter community,

as the first thing you want to do is engage the bogey,

engage the bad guy.

You make him predictable by engaging him

and you use his predictability then against him

and then you kill the bogey.

But the co-pilot doesn't stop there.

Tucker immediately rolls the massive aircraft to the left

in an acrobatic maneuver to try and disarm Calloway.

The men roll along the smoke curtain

to the left side of the plane.

I knew that I had to do something very abrupt,

very, very rough

and something that he would not be expecting.

Tucker has no idea whether rolling the plane

is helping Sanders and Peterson

as they try to restrain Calloway.

The fight continues with the men pinned to the left side of the plane.

The crew members are rapidly losing blood and strength.

Tucker continues to execute the roll all the while trying

to maintain a visual reference outside the captain's window.

Get him, get him, get him, Andy, I got the airplane!

So you roll the airplane over on its back,

and pull through completely into vertical

but at this particular point,

you know, if I've rolled the airplane over on its back

I wouldn't really be able to see what I was doing.

This is not a bubble canopy that you have over the top,

you're actually looking out,

it's got expansive windows but nonetheless,

you roll this airplane over on its back

you can't really see that much of what you're doing,

so I rolled it to about a 140 degrees,

where I could still see out over the side

as the airplane's nose was starting to come through.

Tucker rolls the quarter million kilogram DC-10

to 140 degrees, almost on its back,

commercial aircraft are never meant to roll more than 60 degrees.

The men continue their fight on the ceiling of the aircraft.

Calloway wrenches the hammer in his hand free

and hits Sanders in the head.

Tucker decides to pull back on the yoke

and put the plane into a steep dive.

A risky, but cunning move.

The g-force of the dive pushes the men back

along the ceiling to the smoke curtain.

The plane is travelling at a very dangerous speed.

Tucker is making demands of the aircraft

for which it was not designed.

DC-10s are never meant to be flown past

695 kilometres per hour.

Tucker is over 800 kilometres per hour,

no DC-10 in history has been flown so fast and survived.

The airspeed indicator was maxed and it was all the way

to what we call the barber pole, it couldn't go any faster.

But you could tell that you were going very,

you were quite a bit faster because

the things you don't normally hear in a jet that size,

and one is incredible amounts of sound of wind

coming across the cockpit.

The plane approaches supersonic speed.

With the increased airspeed,

the airflow over the stabilizer becomes disrupted.

The elevators begin to flutter back and forth.

If the flutter becomes more pronounced,

they may become inoperable and Tucker will no longer

have the means to pull the plane out of the dive.

If I didn't pull out soon,

the airplane was probably going to come apart

because I was getting into a phenomenon known as Mach tuck,

where the airplane is pitching over because the airspeed is increasing so much,

the wind flow over the surfaces of the wings

is doing things that it's not even designed to do.

The injury to the left side of Tucker's brain

is beginning to paralyze functions on the right side of his body.

Tucker notices something alarming.

The plane is travelling at this incredible speed

because the throttle levers have been left

in their automatic climb setting from take-off.

The DC-10 is now in a vertical dive

with the engines at nearly full power.

Tucker must release his only usable hand from the yoke

to pull back on the throttles.

With power reduced to idle,

the DC-10 is still not out of danger.

Despite Tucker's maneuvers,

Calloway is gaining the upper hand.

Calloway hit me with the third blow

which was on the top of my head,

nearly rendered me unconscious, I began to gray out.

At that very same time,

it occurred to me we might lose this thing.

As Tucker starts to pull the plane

carefully out of the dive,

the elevator flutter increases.

Balance panels, counterweights that help the pilots manipulate the elevator,

break free and begin to wrinkle the skin of the stabilizer.

Tucker fears that if he pulls back too hard during the dive,

all the surfaces on the tail section

would be in danger of coming off.

Sanders' strength is nearly spent

and Peterson's head is bleeding profusely

from his ruptured temporal artery.

Somehow, they manage to pin their attacker down.

The g-forces began to be reduced

as he began to level off from pulling out of the dive,

I saw the hammer in Calloway's hand.

I then reached for the hammer with both my hands

and pulled the hammer out of his hand.

Sanders believes this is a turning point.

Let go the spear.

The plane is safe for the moment.

About a minute after the attack begins,

Tucker finally has a chance to radio Memphis.

Centre, centre, emergency.

Air traffic controller Kent Fleshman

and his trainee receive Tucker's emergency request.

Aircraft with emergency, say again.

Centre--

Aircraft with emergency, say again.

Listen to me.

It's Express 705. I've been wounded.

We've had an attempt to take over aboard the plane.

Give me a vector please, back to Memphis at this time. Hurry!

Express 705, fly heading 0-9-5 direct Memphis.

0-9-5, direct Memphis,

get an ambulance and alert the airport facility!

Hey Memphis, you still with me?

Affirmative 705, descend and maintain 10,000.

Fleshman takes action in case the hijacker has a gun.

If he can get the plane below 3000 metres,

a bullet hole in the fuselage will not cause

explosive decompression.

Tucker hears the fight increase in the galley.

Again he uses his only weapon, the aircraft.

The maneuver throws the men onto the side of the plane.

Let go of the spear!

Look just keep talking to me, okay?

Express 705 affirmative.

If you need an ambulance, stand by and we'll get that for you.

Yeah, we need an ambulance and uh,

we need armed intervention as well.

Make sure and notify the swat team.

He's asking for armed intervention.

Fleshman recognizes the term "armed intervention"

as the most serious request from a pilot.

It means they want armed officials to storm the plane

upon landing.

Memphis approach has to be alerted.

We have an emergency. Express 705.

He's had an attempted takeover on the aircraft.

He's had an attempted takeover?

Okay, radar contact.

Put him 119.1.

Paul Candolino, a 44-year-old veteran controller

now spots flight 705 on his radar screen.

But something is wrong.

The plane is heading away from the airport.

It looks like the hijacker has seized the plane.

The crew of FedEx flight 705 has been attacked

by a co-worker and have declared an emergency.

Air traffic control watches helplessly as they fly away from the airport,

while the fight for control of the plane continues.

Co-pilot, James Tucker is pushing the DC-10,

his best weapon to its limits.

He now throws the wheel round flipping the massive plane

in the opposite direction.

Tucker, drawing on his military experience,

reverses the roll keeping his maneuvers unpredictable.

Here I am all alone in the cockpit,

the fight is still going on in the back,

I don't know whose winning, I don't know who's losing.

That was about the only time I really had time to be frightened

and it was a very horrifying situation at that point,

thinking that quite possibly Auburn was winning.

Three and a half minutes after the attack,

though pinned and injured,

Auburn Calloway will not relinquish the spear.

The anger was coming in then and so when I hit him,

it was with the intent to disable him

and eliminate his ability to fight,

Not kill but to injure him sufficiently

that he could fight no more.

So when I swung the hammer, it was with all the strength that I had.

Sanders and Peterson momentarily subdue Calloway.

Put it on autopilot and come get here.

The captain's yelling at Tucker to come and help.

But he's the one flying the plane!

Express 705, contact Memphis approach on 119.1.

They are aware of your emergency.

Request a single frequency approach.

A single frequency approach, Roger,

we'll pass that along, 119.1.

- Put it on autopilot-- - Come on Jim.

And get back here!

You have to understand that that's probably

the strangest request that I've ever had, you know,

come my way because here I am the only one up front in the cockpit.

And for me to go ahead, get up and go to the back means

that I've got to, first of all, stand up

which I didn't know until the particular time that I tried to stand up,

it was very, very difficult to do so.

Jim Tucker with a fractured skull

and only one side of his body functioning

puts the plane on autopilot and struggles out of his seat to help.

Wait a minute, I'm coming.

But the plane's gyros have not stabilized sufficiently

for the autopilot to take over.

Okay.

Now, no one's flying the plane.

705 heavy. How do you hear?

Paul Candolino tries to establish radio contact with flight 705,

but there is no response,

their radar screens show the aircraft turn to the north,

then the west, finally south-west,

heading away from the airport.

There is only an eerie silence.

Anything could be happening on board the plane.

So I stepped in the forward cargo area.

I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing.

All three individuals are completely covered in blood.

Auburn Calloway on his back,

there are papers everywhere in the back,

you can see where the jump seats,

which is just a normal commercial airline seat,

has had the covers torn off,

there's bloody footprints on the top of the ceiling,

there are coats that have come out of closets.

Ah, it's total carnage in the back.

Sanders has disarmed Calloway and handed the spear to Tucker.

You move and I'll kill you.

Keep him contained, I'm gonna get the airplane.

- Go get the airplane. - I'm going.

They decide that Sanders, the captain,

should fly the plane back to Memphis.

Here, take this!

Tucker wants the weapons as far away from Calloway as possible

and asks Sanders to take them with him to the cockpit.

In an emergency situation,

it's expected that the captain of the airplane

will fly the airplane.

I was in somewhat of a daze because of the fight.

And I wasn't sure of the direction of the airplane.

I wasn't sure of the condition of the airplane.

But it appeared to be flying okay.

I was bleeding excessively from the top of my head,

I couldn't see out of my left eye.

I thought the fight was over.

I mean, I had hit Calloway four times in the head

with a 20-ounce framing hammer as hard as I could swing it,

he had stopped fighting and he was bleeding

and he looked like he was severely injured.

Tucker can't tell any more whether his hand is gripping the spear.

The blows to his head have caused a blood clot on his brain,

and have damaged his sense of touch.

Let me up. Let me up. I won't fight anymore.

Please, I can't breathe.

Though several gashes have been opened in his skull,

Auburn Calloway cannot be trusted.

Both pilots know their strength is quickly running out.

Sanders safely back in the driver's seat

must get the plane on the ground and fast.

Memphis, can you hear me?

Is this express 705 heavy?

705 heavy, yes.

705 heavy, Memphis Roger, I do hear you.

You can proceed direct to Memphis if able,

expect runway niner.

The altimeter is 30.29.

You understand we're declaring an emergency,

we need security to meet the airplane.

We'll stop it on the runway if we can.

Captain Sanders without his glasses

and with blood dripping into his eyes,

thinks that the plane is on a course back to the airport.

But it is still heading south-west,

away from Memphis at over 550 kilometres per hour.

Roger.

Express 705 heavy, is the situation under control

or is it still in progress?

We appear to have it under control.

Candolino wants to warn the pilot,

but he's afraid the crew may still be under attack

and trying to mislead the hijackers by flying

in the wrong direction.

Express 705 heavy, are you able to turn toward the airport?

Yeah, give me a vector.

1-0-0 vector Memphis

Sanders takes the plane off autopilot

and sets a course back to the airport.

We're turning to the airport now.

For now aboard the DC-10,

the situation seems under control.

But a potential disaster is only moments away.

At the Memphis airport,

emergency personnel begin to move into position.

We need security to meet the airplane,

we'll stop on the runway if we can.

A FedEx cargo plane is about to land

after a would-be hijacker tried to seize control.

All members of the crew are badly injured.

Paramedic David Teague is one of the first to get the call.

They came over the loudspeaker system

from the, uh, air traffic control centre.

And I was new to the area,

so I wasn't able to understand them real well.

But I got the words "hijacking" and some other stuff

and was advised that there had been a hijacking on an airplane.

And then dispatched us out to the runway

where the plane was going to be landing.

The airplane is heading for the safety of Memphis airport.

But that in itself presents another scary possibility.

The aircraft is more than 16,000 kilos

over the recommended landing weight

with more than 38,000 kilos of fuel still in its tanks.

In most emergency landing situations,

there is time and opportunity to dump any excess fuel.

But Sanders knows the switches and levers are too far away

to access safely.

Ah you'd have get up and go back to the engineer's panel

where the fuel dumping switches are

and set up the engineer's fuel panel to dump fuel.

So it's virtually impossible for say the captain

to dump fuel while he's attempting to fly the airplane.

In the galley Auburn Calloway still hasn't given up the fight.

Calloway drags himself towards the jump seats

with Peterson and Tucker on top of him.

He hopes to gain enough leverage to get back on his feet

where he'll have an advantage.

He was using his thumbs to go ahead and try and push my eyes out.

Doing everything he possibly could to break Andy and I down as a team.

You know we could handle him together,

but we certainly couldn't handle him one-on-one.

So certainly a fight against the clock.

Auburn's getting stronger, we're getting weaker.

I knew if he ever got back in the cockpit, we were history.

I just knew we had to keep him, somehow,

we had to keep him from getting back in that cockpit.

Approaching 7000 feet, the fight at the back started again.

And it was as violent and as loud

as when I was in the back in the midst of the fight.

It became so violent and loud that approaching 7000 feet

I decided that I was going to level the airplane,

turn on the autopilot,

go to the back of the airplane

and kill Calloway.

It was so severe, I thought that had to be done.

The DC-10 is less than 40 kilometres from Memphis airport.

Is he, is he under control?

The sound of the struggle worries Sanders.

He decides this has to end.

I released my seatbelt, climbed out of my seat,

head to the back of the airplane and Jim Tucker said to me,

"David, I think we have him under control now."

I said, "Are you sure?"

Yeah, he is.

I said, "I think we have him under control."

I went back to the seat, climbed into the left seat of the airplane,

continued to descend on down to the airport.

Express 705 heavy.

Verify the situation is still under control.

Yeah, we're... Sort of under control.

The wind is uh, 0-3-0.

At five, cleared to land runway niner.

Cleared to land?

Now, Sanders faces yet another possible disaster.

The delay caused by getting out of his seat

means he's way over the normal approach speed.

Too high and too fast.

He will not be able to slow the overweight plane quickly enough

to land on runway niner.

I'm coming around to three-six left.

Runway 36 left is longer at 2800 metres

but it is perpendicular to his flight path.

To land there, he needs to make a series of turns,

reasonable maneuvers for a fighter jet or a crop duster,

but for an overloaded DC-10 with an injured pilot,

nearly impossible.

First he must turn 90 degrees to the right,

fly parallel to the runway and then execute

a tight 180-degree turn.

Okay, express 705 heavy, runway 36 left,

clear to land, clear visual approach 36 left,

the wind is 0-5-0 at 8.

Sanders must ignore the computer warnings

and push the plane beyond normal operating limits.

The plane is nearly on its side.

All of a sudden, he just turned it up on its wing tip.

It looked like a fighter jet and put in a real tight turn

and then disappeared down behind the terminal,

when he got down low enough, we couldn't see him.

And, uh, at first,

I thought he might have crashed because there was some construction going on

on the airport at that time

and there was some smoke coming up south of the terminal,

kind of where we were going.

A hammer is lying in the galley.

The men struggle to reach it.

This could be Calloway's last chance to gain control.

Sanders has turned 90 degrees to the south

flying the downwind leg parallel to runway 3-6 left.

The airplane was probably at about

300 feet above the ground at that time.

The throttles were at idle,

they'd been at idle since I left 7,000 feet.

That's an extremely unusual engine power setting to land a big airplane,

you always land,

make the approach with power on, a lot of power on.

In this case it was at idle because I wanted the airplane to slow down

so that we'd not exceed the limits of the landing gear and the flaps,

so that we would touch down at or below a 195 knots.

With flaps extended and landing gear down,

Sanders is still coming in too fast

and he is being bombarded by computerized auto-warning alarms.

The runway is 2800 metres long.

A normal DC-10 needs only 1900 metres to stop,

but flight 705 is too heavy.

Even this runway may not be long enough.

Peterson manages for the first time in the fight to get hold of a hammer

but is extremely weak due to blood loss.

You gotta hit him Andy, you gotta hit him.

I was on the flight pleading with him I told him,

I said, Andy, you know, you got to hit him.

You know, he's about ready, you know to take us down.

I guess I gave him kind of a blank stare of, you know,

"What are you talking about?"

and he looked at me real stern like a father would look at his son,

saying you've got to do this and he said, "Hit him."

The DC-10 is only metres above the runway,

travelling at 382 kilometres per hour.

Sanders can only hope he won't explode the tires,

or crash beyond the runway.

Luckily, all 10 tires withstand the landing impact.

Captain David Sanders has landed the plane

with only 300 metres of runway to spare.

The crew of flight 705 is safely on the ground but not out of danger.

Blow the door.

The chute is covered with kind of a talcum powder,

so it won't stick when it needs to be deployed and,

but it made it slick trying to go up.

The police and the firemen tried to climb up the slide.

One fireman made it almost all the way to the top

and I leaned out the door of the airplane

and pulled him on board.

Who is the bad guy?

That's the attacker.

There was, there was blood all over the floor,

all over the ceiling,

the seats in the little area were just covered with blood.

You got any handcuffs?

- No. - If not, you'd better get some

'cause that son of a bitch is still dangerous.

I need handcuffs, can you throw me some handcuffs?

Teague is thrown a pair of handcuffs.

Stand here, in the middle on the chain.

Get your foot off! You're hurting me!

Sanders holds Calloway down

as Teague examines Peterson who barely has a pulse

and is the first crew member to leave the plane.

Sanders is the last member of the crew on board.

Standing in the door of the airplane ...

I had a sense of euphoria

I've never experienced before or since.

It was the sense of we have been there

and...

And we came back and we won.

Due to the strength and courage of its crew

a FedEx DC-10 has safely landed back home.

The three men have weathered the attack of a co-worker.

But they're badly injured.

Co-pilot Jim Tucker has bone chips driven into his brain.

Flight engineer Andy Peterson's life

is in danger from massive blood loss.

Both are in critical condition.

The wounded men are rushed to the regional medical centre at Memphis.

The pilot, Dave Sanders shares an ambulance with Tucker.

It is only during this ride that he realizes the extent

and severity of his co-pilot's injuries.

Tucker is taken to emergency by stretcher,

Sanders is helped but can still walk.

Restrained and under guard,

Calloway is also taken to the same emergency facility.

But the important question still remains.

Why did Auburn Calloway attack the crew of flight 705?

The full story is beginning to unfold.

Divorced in 1990,

Auburn Calloway still tries to support his ex-wife

and their two children

and wants to secure their financial future.

He was very interested in the welfare of his children,

very interested that they not

live the kind of childhood he had lived.

The evidence for a suicidal mission against FedEx

grows as investigators search the aircraft

and find a letter to Calloway's estranged wife.

Dear pat,

I want you and the kids to know that I lived for you.

I thought of your welfare every day,

though, for example, how can I guarantee

having enough money for Keelah and Burney's Stanford education.

He was obsessed with his financial well-being.

He was interested in his children.

I tend to believe he was interested in his marriage.

Now I know his marriage was coming apart

or had come apart, basically, at the time of this incident.

But I suspect he was also a difficult man to be married to.

By April 7, 1994,

Calloway may be thinking his career is over.

Life had been one disappointment after another.

The failed marriage.

The kids he can't afford to send to university.

The brilliant pilot who ends up as an engineer on a cargo plane.

And now even that may be about to go.

The following day, he is supposed to report to a FedEx hearing

about falsified information he'd given the company.

During our investigation,

it appeared that he had overestimated the number

of hours of flight experience that he had and,

uh, that the company was taking a look at this.

Calloway may be afraid he will be fired.

At just 42, his professional life could be finished.

He comes up with a solution.

The goal is...

to leave my children well off.

The goal is to escape, I guess, the pain of this life.

Uh, I can't continue to participate in this life

and still leave them well off

because I'm fixing to lose my career,

and I won't have the ability to provide for them

like I'd like to,

but my life has value if it's given in an accident.

Calloway cashes in all the funds he can lay his hands on

and sends a total of $54,000 to his ex-wife.

But his life insurance is worth about $2,5 million

if he dies in a work-related accident.

I would much rather go on a date, time, place

and a method of my own choosing.

I resolved quite some time ago that the next time

my security and future is threatened

or seriously jeopardized, it's time,

my time to go.

Perhaps he believes his family would receive

the maximum insurance payout if he crashed the plane

in an apparent accident.

If this was Calloway's idea,

he was planning it perfectly.

He was armed with unusual weapons for a hijacking,

hammers and a spear gun.

After injuring the crew, he could take control of the plane.

A bomb or gun could leave traces at the scene of a crash.

But if investigators found a spear gun, or hammers,

it would be very difficult to tie them to an attack on the crew.

I believe it would have been impossible

to tell the difference in the type of injuries

that a hammer would have made, uh,

with the type of injuries that you might sustain in a large crash.

Auburn had spent the week leading up to this, uh, incident

preparing to die and, basically, get his affairs in order.

Calloway even goes to a lawyer to change his will

before boarding the FedEx flight.

He left his will and testament on his bed

so that it would be easily found.

For any crash to look like an accident,

there is a key obstacle:

the plane's cockpit voice recorder.

Switching off the CVR's power would disable any recording.

I think she'll fly.

As long as the nuts and bolts are there.

If Peterson in his pre-flight inspection

discovers the thrown switch, it would be a setback,

but Calloway would know, he simply has to fly

the airplane for half an hour.

That's the length of the tape's recording time.

After 30 minutes, any incriminating recording would be gone forever.

I think he was going to do something very, very horrible with it.

Something along the lines of what we've seen on 9/11.

Had Calloway been able to seize control of the plane,

he could have crashed the DC-10

with over 38,000 kilos of fuel aboard

into any site, including the FedEx headquarters,

the hub, crippling his employer

and killing a large number of workers on the ground.

It would have been the ultimate revenge

for perceived injustices by the company

The company may never have figured out exactly why

that airplane crashed back into the hub.

Well, after 9/11, there were a lot of

improvements to our security program,

both in the United States and worldwide.

Our cockpit crew members are the most highly checked

and monitored group of people in the world.

I only know of this one incident

in my 46 years of aviation experience

where a crew member was involved in something like this.

The flight of FedEx 705 took about 30 minutes.

But the impact it had will last for years.

He was convicted of attempted aircraft piracy.

An offence that carries a minimum of 20 years' confinement

and up to life imprisonment.

Although Auburn Calloway pleaded temporary insanity at his trial,

the jury didn't believe him and found him guilty.

On August 11, 1995,

he was sentenced to life imprisonment

in a federal penitentiary.

He has no chance of parole.

The pilots on flight 705, they are the real heroes.

It is amazing that they were able to do what they did,

given the injuries that were inflicted upon them in.

When someone is struck with a hammer on the skull,

there could be linear radiating cracks

that go out on the skull,

and then if it is hard enough, there may well be in-driven bone

right at the site where the hammer head hits the skull

and drives it into the skull.

This is a replica of my skull cap.

It was put together by use of a cat scan protocol.

To give the proper shape of my skull

and also the shape of the defect that we're dealing with here.

This is the area that I was hit in the left parietal.

For a year and a half, I was actually walking around in this configuration.

It took two-and-a-half years to recover completely

because I had to learn how to walk, talk and chew gum all over again.

I had three major operations.

I operated on him twice more after his initial injury

and then followed him through his rehabilitation.

They can fashion a piece of material

to fit the exact size of the defect,

the shape of the skull and, of course, the thickness of the skull as well.

It's a blown acrylic called an HTR or hard tissue replacement.

He had difficulty with speech,

he had difficulty with sensation

and motor strength on the right side.

And he came back to where he could now,

probably if he wanted to, break my fingers with a handshake.

On May 26, 1994,

the crew of FedEx flight 705 was awarded

the airline pilots association Gold Medal award for heroism.

The highest award a civilian pilot can receive.

However, because of the legacy of their injuries,

none of the crew has been certified as medically fit to fly commercially.

I always thought, I'm going to fight.

I'm gonna overcome this thing.

Except that that's when they found out

that I had a slight seizure disorder.

I'm seizure free, but it's because I take medication.

And the only way for me to be able to fly,

without somebody with me, is to be off of medication.

At this particular point it's been,

it's been ascertained that I'll never be able to do that.

I'll be on medication for the rest of my life.

I miss the flying.

Every time I see an airplane go over, you know,

I wonder where it's going.

So, I miss that part of it.

Uh, but I really cherish the fact that,

you know, I'm still alive and able to be with my family.

You know, the bond that pilots and...

And what you do together in the airplane

and outside of the airplane, all that, I miss that.

I miss it very much.

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