On 7 April 1994, Auburn Calloway boarded FedEx flight 705, a DC-10 freighter leaving Memphis for San Jose, riding in the jumpseat as an off-duty employee. He was facing a disciplinary hearing over falsified flight hours. He carried hammers and a spear gun in a guitar case, and he intended to kill the crew, take the aircraft and crash it into the FedEx headquarters, in a way that would appear accidental so that his family would receive his life insurance.
The attack
Twenty minutes into the flight he attacked the three crew with a claw hammer. Captain David Sanders, First Officer Jim Tucker and Flight Engineer Andy Peterson all suffered severe head injuries, including skull fractures. Tucker was partially paralysed down one side.
The choice of a hammer was deliberate: blunt trauma would be indistinguishable from crash injuries, preserving the appearance of an accident.
What the crew did
Peterson and Sanders fought Calloway hand to hand in the cockpit and then in the passageway behind it, while Tucker — the most seriously injured, and with the use of only one side of his body — flew the aircraft.
Tucker's flying is the reason this is a survival story. He rolled the DC-10 into extreme manoeuvres deliberately, including past 140 degrees of bank and into a steep dive that took the aircraft close to its structural limits and beyond its certified speed. The purpose was to throw Calloway around the cabin and stop him from overpowering the other two.
It worked. The aircraft was flown in ways no transport category aircraft is designed for, by a pilot with a fractured skull and one working arm.
The landing
They turned back for Memphis. Tucker flew the approach and landed the aircraft, at high speed and with the crew still holding Calloway down. Emergency services boarded and arrested him.
All three pilots survived. Their injuries ended two of their flying careers.
What changed
The case drove changes in screening and access. Jumpseat riding by company employees was reviewed across the industry, and the assumption that an authorised employee poses no threat was formally re-examined. Employee background and mental fitness monitoring received attention it had not previously had.
Calloway was convicted of attempted murder and air piracy and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The NTSB did not classify this as an accident in the usual sense — there was no aircraft failure and no crash. It is studied instead as a security case and as an extraordinary example of task performance under injury: three men with skull fractures who fought an attacker and landed a widebody in about half an hour.