Globe public editor: The “first” airplane hijacking in Canada

By Sylvia Stead, public editor of The Globe and Mail

It can be risky to write about an incident or person being “the first” or “the only.” Even if you are quite convinced you are right based on extensive research, there should be a slight doubt.

By Sylvia Stead, public editor of The Globe and Mail

It can be risky to write about an incident or person being “the first” or “the only.” Even if you are quite convinced you are right based on extensive research, there should be a slight doubt.

A Moment in Time feature in the paper on December 26 was very careful in describing an airplane hijacking on that date, Dec. 26 in 1971. The article said a passenger slipped a note to a flight attendant on landing in Toronto. The note said: “Take me to the captain in the cockpit. We are going to Havana. This is no joke.”

The article said that while hijackings were a problem in the U.S. in those days, this was the “first in Canada to be carried out successfully.”

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That qualification made the article correct. It also implied that there had been other hijackings that were not carried out successfully, as in the hijacker did not make it safely to his destination.

In this case the hijacker flew to Cuba and disappeared and in a fascinating twist, 30 years later an Ontario detective found the hijacker’s name on the internet and found him in his native New York. He was arrested on Sept. 10, 2001, But the problem was the headline went one step too far in saying: First Airplane Hijacking in Canada.

While that hijacking was the first carried out successfully, it was not the first and so this clarification ran on page two: “A Thursday Moment in Time headline said a 1971 plane hijacking was the first in Canada. While the article correctly says this was the first successful hijacking, there was at least one earlier hijacking that was thwarted.”

As often happens, it was a Globe reader who caught the error. In this case, the reader also had first-hand information about the earlier hijacking.

He wrote: “The first plane hijacking in Canada was not on December 26, 1971, but over three years earlier on September 11, 1968 – a direct flight from Saint John, N.B., to Toronto, which was rerouted to Montreal. The hijacker was Charles Laverne Beasley, a Black Power activist from Texas. I know because I was on the flight.”

In my search online I saw two spellings for Laverne/Lavern, but it too was an interesting tale of a hijacking. Here’s a link to one, which tells the story of the flight from Saint John to Toronto. Mr. Beasley held a gun to the head of a stewardess while demanding to be flown to Cuba. The airline convinced him they needed to stop to refuel in Montreal, where he was convinced by the RCMP assistant commissioner to turn himself in.

To continue reading this column, please go theglobeandmail.com where it was originally published. 

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