05/06/2026
On May 5, 1972, Frederick W. Hahneman, a 49-year-old engineer from Easton, boarded an Eastern Airlines 727 at Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Airport. In the era before airport metal detectors, he carried a handgun onto the plane. Shortly after takeoff, Hahneman pointed the gun at the pilot and took over the plane.
It was ABE’s first and only highjacking, and apparently the first in Pennsylvania. Hahneman demanded $303,000 in cash from Eastern Airlines and told the pilot to land at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Along with the cash, Hahneman wanted six parachutes, two jump suits, two bush knives, food, and two cartons of Benson & Hedges ci******es.
The Eastern jet circled Washington for an hour while airline officials scrambled to collect the money and gear. Hundreds of D.C. residents, including me and most of my American University classmates, had the unsettling experience of watching a highjacking in progress as the plane make several low, slow passes over the city.
Hahneman let the passengers and all but one of the flight attendants off the plane before it left Dulles in the late afternoon. At 4 AM on May 6 - possibly inspired by D.B. Cooper’s legendary jump from a plane over Washington State five months earlier - he parachuted into Honduras. After an intensive manhunt by the FBI and Honduran police, Hahneman turned himself in at the US Embassy. The money, which Hahneman claimed he had deposited in a “Chinese Communist” bank, was eventually recovered though the FBI never revealed how this was accomplished. Hahneman was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 1984 and died in California in 1991. His wife and children in Easton, who knew nothing of his plans, never heard from him again after he left their home on May 2, 1972.
