On this day, June 16, in 1948 , four men stormed the Miss Macao, an American-owned seaplane headed from Macau to Hong Kong, marking the first hijacking of a commercial plane.
The pilot, Dale Warren Cramer, refused to surrender the controls, and the co-pilot attacked one of the intruders. Cramer was shot dead, and collapsed onto the controls. The plane went into a dive and crashed in the Pearl River Delta.
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Twenty-five of the 26 people on board died. The sole survivor, Huang Yu, confessed to being one of the hijackers.
However, the British colonial government in Hong Kong stated that the attack happened over Chinese territory and it had no authority. Huang was released without trial, and deported to China.
– Scott McCabe
