The 20-minute flight that became the world's first airplane hijacking

CNN

15-07-2025

These days, travel between the harbor cities of Hong Kong and Macao takes an hour by high-speed ferry. But from 1948 to 1961, when the two were still colonies of European powers, wealthy tourists could opt for a brief trip by air.
Miss Macao was not a beauty queen. She was a Consolidated Model 28 Catalina seaplane that whisked travelers from Portuguese-controlled Macao to British-controlled Hong Kong, a 20-minute trip. These jaunts were called 'cigarette flights,' since the duration was about the length of time needed to smoke one — and you could, since there were no rules against smoking on planes.
Back then, getting on a plane 'was like taking a bus,' says Dan Porat, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If they could afford it, passengers could buy their tickets as they boarded the plane, with no need to book in advance.
The Macau Air Transport Company, a now-defunct branch of Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific flagship airline, operated two of these Catalina 'flying boats.' As Macao didn't have an airport or land cleared for a runway, the planes could take off from its coastal waters.
Flying became a popular option for businessmen going between the two cities, especially those who were bringing in items like gold, since Macao was the only open gold market in East Asia at the time.
But then, on July 16, 1948, Miss Macao failed to arrive at Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport. Officials in Hong Kong quickly sounded the alarm, and local police began searching the waters between the two cities.
The only survivor, a 24-year-old Chinese rice farmer named Wong Yu, was rescued by a fisherman and taken to the hospital in Macao. According to multiple news reports at the time, one of Wong's legs was broken, and he was wearing a life jacket he'd managed to grab as the plane descended.
Although Wong claimed to be an ordinary passenger and explained that the plane had exploded in midair, inconsistencies in his story and his questionable behavior — including trying to escape from the hospital — led authorities and the press to a different explanation: The Miss Macao crashed into the sea while being taken over by 'air pirates,' an incident that the China Mail, a Hong Kong English-language newspaper, called 'unparalleled in the history of aviation.'
On the day it last took off, Miss Macao had two pilots in the cockpit: American captain Dale Cramer and Australian first officer Ken McDuff, both former military airmen. In total, there were 27 people on board: along with 24 passengers, there was a single flight attendant, Delca da Costa, a Portuguese national from Macao who was also McDuff's girlfriend.
Four of the passengers, though, had no intention of going to Hong Kong. In a confession, Wong said that he and three fellow would-be thieves had sold everything they owned to buy the tickets, figuring that the proceeds from the crime would be worth it.
As historian Luis Andrade de Sa explains in his book 'Aviation in Macau: One Hundred Years of Adventure,' shortly after the plane took off from Macao, the four hijackers quickly sprang into action, with one storming into the cockpit and demanding that the pilots surrender control of the aircraft.
According to multiple historical accounts, the lead hijacker, Chiu Tok, had taken flying lessons in Manila and planned to take over captaining the plane once the pilots were subdued.
However, he hadn't anticipated that Cramer would refuse to let go of the controls, nor that there would be resistance in the main cabin. As one passenger tussled with a hijacker, a gun went off. McDuff swung at Chiu Tok with an iron bar. The hijackers shot both pilots, and Cramer's body landed on the plane's joystick control, sending the aircraft plummeting into the South China Sea.
An August 1948 article in Time magazine described the scene in colorful language, writing that the four hijackers 'looked hungrily' at the rich passengers they were targeting.
Wong was picked up by a local boat and treated for his injuries. His story about surviving a midair explosion was quickly disproven when pieces of Miss Macao's wreckage were recovered, punctured by bullet holes.
Getting the true account of events out of Wong wouldn't be easy. He was in poor physical and mental health, so police were reluctant to use harsh interrogation. Instead, they came up with an unorthodox plan: they filled the hospital with sleeper agents. Dozens of Chinese-speaking undercover police officers posing as patients were tasked with befriending Wong, and they eventually got him to admit what really happened on board Miss Macao.
He confessed that the plan had been for the hijackers to seize control of the plane and redirect it to a town in Guangdong province in southern China, where the passengers and crew would be robbed of their valuables and then held for ransom.
No one was supposed to die.
The hijacking of the Miss Macao was so novel that no one had ever applied the word 'hijacking' to such a situation — press at the time called it 'air piracy.'
The concept of scanning passengers with a metal detector before they boarded a plane was still decades away. Only the most cursory of security checks were carried out, with some items of luggage opened and searched.
The hijackers had prepared for that — they'd tied their guns to their legs with black string, and the China Mail newspaper reported at the time that one had hidden bullets in the hollowed-out sole of his shoe.
Although Wong eventually told the full story of what happened on board Miss Macao, there was confusion over how to prosecute him — and who would do it. Portuguese authorities in Macao said that because the plane was owned by a British company, Wong's trial would need to take place in Hong Kong. But because the hijackers were all Chinese, British officials in Hong Kong said the case was not in their jurisdiction either.
Finally, in 1951, Wong was deported from Macao to mainland China, where he died not long after, at the age of 27. He never stood trial for robbery, murder or piracy.
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As for the two former colonial cities, their own air travel industries blossomed in the decades to come.
Hong Kong became one of the world's biggest air hubs as its economy grew in the late 20th century. The city became a financial capital and the gateway to mainland China.
It outgrew Kai Tak Airport, which closed in 1998 and was replaced with the larger Hong Kong International, which is consistently ranked among the best airports in the world.
Meanwhile, Macao International Airport opened in 1995. These days, the airport has a small exhibit about important aviation stories that happened there — including the hijacking of the Miss Macao.
The story of the Hong Kong-Macao hijacking quickly fell out of newspapers. Many people in the nascent commercial aviation industry saw it as a terrible one-off and didn't believe that plane hijacking — or skyjacking as it was called at the peak of its popularity — would become commonplace. There was also a fear that too much coverage of the story would scare off would-be flyers.
When the United States established the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958 to regulate air travel, the legislation made no mention of preventing skyjacking, a sign that it was still not seen as a significant issue. But the social unrest of the years that followed, and the growth and increasing affordability of air travel, changed all that, historians say.
From 1968 to 1972, the airlines went through what became known as the 'golden age of hijacking,' a phrase popularized by Brendan I. Koerner in his book 'The Skies Belong to Us.'
'Every five and a half days, there was a hijacking,' says Porat, the history professor. 'This is the time where the industry is trying to develop. And basically, (hijacking) becomes a threat.'
Some of the incidents followed the same plan as the Miss Macao incident — a group of hijackers would take over the plane, land it in a third location, rob the prisoners, and hold the passengers and/or the plane for ransom.
Other hijackers claimed political reasons for taking over airplanes, demanding passage to North Vietnam, Algeria or Cuba, all of which were at odds with the United States. It happened the other way in a few cases, too. Individuals from countries behind the Iron Curtain — often members of the flight crew — would demand to be flown to a non-communist nation where they could claim political asylum.
Hijacking became so common that airline head offices kept large amounts of cash on hand in case they needed to fork it over to a would-be hijacker, Koerner explains in his book.
William Landes, a US economist and emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Law School, estimates that during this so-called 'golden age,' hijackings cost the aviation industry $219,221 per passenger.
According to Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Porat, the hijacking of a 1968 plane by Palestinian militants was 'largely agreed upon in scholarly circles to be the first international act of international terrorism (via) the hijacking of a plane.'
Three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took over El Al Flight 426, which was traveling from Rome to Israel, and diverted the plane to Algeria. The non-Israeli passengers and crew were allowed to leave and board a plane to France, while 40 male Israelis were held for 40 days before being released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Although everyone on board El Al 426 survived, skyjackings had become too big to ignore. The cost to airlines was astronomical, and industry executives were fed up.
As Koerner puts it, 'By the end of 1972, the skyjackers had become so reckless, so dismissive of human life, that the airlines and the federal government had no choice but to turn every airport into a miniature police state.'
Porat agrees. Although there was initially pushback from travelers, there had been enough high-profile hijackings that safety had become a significant concern. And they acquiesced, agreeing to walk through metal detectors, have their luggage X-rayed, and more.
'We're so used to this being searched thing that it's quite incredible,' Porat says.
In 1970, the UN Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, a multilateral agreement to proscribe and punish the hijacking of planes, was approved at The Hague.
It called hijackings 'a matter of grave concern,' adding that 'unlawful acts of seizure or exercise of control of aircraft in flight jeopardize the safety of persons and property, seriously affect the operation of air services, and undermine the confidence of the peoples of the world in the safety of civil aviation.'
In 1971, US President Richard Nixon appointed Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. the country's first — and so far only — 'hijacking czar.' Davis wanted to impose strict screening procedures at airports but was met with pushback from the aviation industry, which believed that passengers would balk at the rules and give up on air travel.
Still, in 1973, Nixon introduced mandatory metal detector screenings for all passengers in the United States and X-rays for all bags. And the 9/11 attacks, closely followed by the attempted bombing of a Paris-to-Miami flight with explosives hidden in a shoe, brought on the familiar grueling security checks of today — none of which, for all the industry's fears in the Nixon era, discouraged the public from flying.
What happened on the Miss Macao was not a singular story. It was the first of many aviation incidents that would transform the way humans travel by air. Before 'the golden age of hijacking' or the September 11, 2001 attacks, one nearly forgotten seaplane set a new age of aviation into motion.