MONTEGO BAY, St James – She can laugh about it now.

But 39 years ago, May 1, 1970, when Jennifer Hanna found herself at the centre of a hijacking drama aboard a British West Indian Airways (BWIA) Boeing 727 Sunjet enroute from Kingston to Miami, she was absolutely terrified.

Hanna – then Selman – was the purser aboard the flight which originated in Trinidad and Tobago, with scheduled stops in Jamaica and the Grand Cayman.

“We had just taken off from Kingston and I was standing in the galley when two men approached from the economy class. I instinctively went up to them and asked if I could help, because they were headed to the first-class section which was not allowed,” Hanna recalled in an interview with the Observer.

The men – described by the newspapers of the day as American Negroes – never answered. Instead they put a knife to the neck of air hostess, Elizabeth Wrigley and told her to go to the cockpit. “She didn’t see what was happening as she wasn’t facing them, however, I saw clearly and so I said ‘Go Liz go, just go’ I then pressed the emergency several times to alert the captain,” she continued.

Thus started a train of events that Hannah will never forget.

Instead of moving on to Grand Cayman and then Miami, the aircraft was forced to go to Havana, Cuba where the men held the 63 passengers, including the crew, hostage for approximately seven hours while demanding that the plane be refuelled and flown to Algiers for a meeting with American Author Eldridge Cleaver, a Black

Panther who was living there in exile.

“This is your new commander and the flight’s name is changed to AAFF, Afro American Freedom Flight Number One,” one of the hijackers announced from the cockpit according to clippings from the Trinidad Guardian newspaper.

“It was really terrifying. They had a map with them and they were pointing out from a layman’s perspective how they wanted to go from Cuba to Guyana, from Guyana to Natal in Brazil and then to Dakar, Africa. They were talking about uncharted territory and all the time I remember thinking that they might kidnap me and keep me in Africa since I was the only visibly black crew member,” said Hanna, pointing to the pictures of the other crew members.

The day was saved by a quick-thinking and experienced captain, Keith Melville who told the men, who threatened to shoot up the passengers and throw their bodies outside, that there was a leak in the second engine.

“At first they said he should put the oil in engine number one into engine number two, and the captain explained that that would take at least two days with the help of a trained engineer.

His ostensible explanation was so convincing that the men decided to give up the plan.

“They walked off the plane straight into the arms of the Cuban authorities and that was that, end of drama.

We never heard what happened to them after that,” said Hanna who worked with the airline for a further six years before relocating to Montego Bay and marrying Dalkeith Hanna, a quantity surveyor.