A New Brunswick podcast is utilizing its platform and the applied sciences of the trendy age to achieve a brand new viewers with a dramatic story about Canada’s aviation historical past — from an period when airport safety was as lax as getting on a bus.
Saint John: Nothing Occurred Right here, in a two-part collection, brings the nation’s first-ever skyjacking to mild.
“This is like a little nugget from the past, and it’s an interesting piece of Canadian history and … it was news for a day and kind of buried away,” Greg Marquis, a College of New Brunswick Saint John historical past professor and co-host of the podcast, mentioned.
It began a few 12 months in the past, when Marquis got here throughout a information clipping from Sept. 11, 1968, about an incident on Air Canada flight 303 from Saint John to Toronto.
Marquis dug deeper and carried out in depth interviews with passengers and crew that had been on that flight.
He mentioned the podcast format has allowed him, and co-host Mark Allan Greene, to achieve an viewers that won’t take the time to attend a historical past lecture or do their very own analysis into historic occasions.
On September 11, 1968, an Air Canada Viscount aircraft was hijacked shortly after leaving Saint John — a primary in Canadian aviation. Now, a historical past professor is reigniting curiosity within the occasion in a brand new podcast.
In 1968, boarding a flight was easy. There have been no safety checkpoints and even the necessity to present identification.
Bud Cavanaugh mentioned Sept. 11 of that 12 months was a moderately boring day to be an Air Canada ticket agent, with solely six folks needing to examine in.
He remembers seeing a automotive pull as much as the airport that regarded totally different from the others.
“The licence plate wasn’t the same, it must have been Quebec or Ontario.”
A tall man walked out of the automotive and into the airport. He checked in with no baggage.
That man was Charles Lavern Beasley, a Texas native, carrying a .22-calibre pistol.
‘I knew we were in trouble’
Sue Pridham, simply 19 years previous on the time, was boarding the flight to Toronto with desires of transferring to the massive metropolis for a change, “wanting some different experience, which I certainly did starting out,” she mentioned.
Whereas ready to board the aircraft, Pridham remembers seeing a person who regarded suspicious. He was holding a beige raincoat over his arm.
Pridham’s father, who was saying goodbye to her on the airport, identified the person and mentioned, “There’s really something fishy about him,” she mentioned.
She then kissed her dad and mom and boarded the aircraft.
The person in query entered final, she mentioned, nonetheless with the raincoat over his arm, “I knew then that we were in trouble … I just had that feeling.”
Flight attendants had begun to serve passengers when the person stood up abruptly and held a gun to the again of 1 flight attendant’s neck.
Pridham mentioned the flight attendants spoke quietly to one another earlier than they headed again to the cockpit. And dinner was served shortly after.
Beasley barged into the cockpit demanding he be taken to Cuba.
The pilot informed Beasley the aircraft didn’t have sufficient gasoline to make it to his most popular vacation spot.
It was seemingly round this time, simply 20 minutes since Cavanaugh had checked-in the hijacker, that crew again on the airport had been notified.
“We found out from the radio range boys out back that the flight had been skyjacked,” mentioned Cavanaugh. “We were all surprised and just waiting for information to come in.”
The aircraft landed in Montreal about an hour later. “The captain said we had an unexpected guest … and we had to make a stop in Dorval,” mentioned Pridham.
Searching of the window of the aircraft, Pridham mentioned you possibly can see RCMP and Quebec police exterior with weapons drawn.
One factor that struck Marquis when conducting interviews for the podcast was how calm everybody on the aircraft appeared throughout this nerve-racking occasion.
And even now, there doesn’t appear to be a lot animosity towards the hijacker.
“I found that interesting, the fact that this guy had a loaded gun in a pressurized cabin and was pointing it at flight attendants and possibly the crew,” mentioned Marquis.
“They had a very mature attitude about what had happened.”
For Pridham, retelling this story has been “kind of neat.”
“For the younger populations, but also for the Air Canada pilots and stewardesses, to bring this back to their mind that their staff went through a horrific time in their lives.”
