The Skyjack Habit

The first telephone call to the White House got the idea across. ''Looks like we've got another one.'' cried a Federal Aviation Agency official. "A Pan Am out of Mexico City. We'll call you back as soon as we have the details.'' Five calls to the President on that day last week fleshed out the details: four minutes out of Mexi co City, while southbound for Guatemala City with 81 aboard, a four-jet Pan American World Airways DC-8 had been "skyjacked" by a lone gunman and ordered to turn course for Cuba.

The DC-8 was the fourth U.S. plane skyjacked since May, and in this case the skywayman was plainly a mental case. Albert Charles Cadon, 27, was a Parisian who settled in Manhattan in 1957, tried his awkward hand at abstract painting, wound up as a busboy. Late last year he spent time in a psychiatric ward; later, Cadon raided the Chemstrand Corp.'s Empire State Building offices and smeared display posters with black paint in protest against a new fiber that, he said, had been named "Cadon'' without his permission. Fortnight ago, Cadon left his German-born wife in New York, next appeared aboard Pan Am's Flight 501 as it left Mexico City on its biweekly flight through Central America to Panama.

Togetherness. Like other skyjacked pilots before him. Captain Carl Ballard attempted to bluff his way out. The fuel on board was inadequate for an 1,100-mile over-water flight to Cuba, he protested. "All right,'' answered Cadon nonchalantly, "we'll all go down together.'' Ballard shrugged and set a new heading. To Mexico City airport controllers, awaiting his overdue call, he reported himself 200 miles away over Veracruz, added cryptically: "I estimate my arrival time at Havana will be 12:35 Mexico time." At one point Cadon, who said he had once served in the French army in Algeria, remarked: "I do not like the way Washington interfered in the Algerian situation. I am taking this means to show my protest."

Unknown to Cadon, Flight 501 had a VIP aboard. Colombia's Foreign Minister Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala had been in Mexico, was on a tour of Latin American capitals to unify opposition to Castro's Cuban Communism. The Colombian government snapped off a demand for the immediate release of its foreign minister, said that any other action would be "an official act of hostility."

International Pastime. As it happened, Fidel Castro seemed about as dismayed by the latest skyjacking as the U.S.'s Jack Kennedy; with U.S. indignation running at fever pitch, continued aeronautical piracies could wind Castro up in a disastrous (for him) shooting war with the U.S. Aware of this, Cuban officials, though they arrested Cadon, made no effort to keep the DC-8 when it landed in Havana. They offered the passengers daiquiris, sandwiches, and music by a strolling trio before they flew back to Miami. Moreover, Castro offered to trade an Eastern Air Lines Electra, skyjacked earlier (TIME. Aug. 4), for a Cuban patrol boat sailed to the U.S. by Cuban defectors. At week's end the U.S. agreed.

The continuing skyjacking cases posed a real problem for the U.S. The fact that though Havana was the destination, Castro had not plotted the two latest seizures only increased the frustration. Last week the U.S. Congress rushed through legislation making skyjacking a capital offense. President Kennedy ordered armed U.S. Border Patrolmen to ride along on flights that seem most susceptible to skyjacking; airline captains were instructed to keep their doors locked. Skyjacking seemed well on the way to becoming a deadly international pastime--and, all too obviously, no one had yet come up with a way to stop it effectively.

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