Rampage Nation by Louis Klarevas

Author:Louis Klarevas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880672
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Francisco Gonzales had repeatedly told family members that he would kill himself, and he threatened to take others with him. He even told a few acquaintances that his last day on Earth would be either May 6 or May 7. The writing was clearly on the wall.7

His friends and family knew the twenty-seven-year-old San Francisco resident was struggling. He had hit hard times. Only four years earlier, he had proudly represented the Philippines in the Olympics as a member of the national yacht team. But by 1964, his marriage was falling apart, his financial position was in ruins due in large part to an accumulation of massive debt, and his mental health was deteriorating.8

On May 6, 1964, Gonzales legally purchased a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver and decided to head out to Reno, Nevada, for a night of gambling.9 Back then, Harrah's and Harold's Club casinos worked in partnership with Pacific Air Lines, offering a special $25.99 round-trip fare that brought customers from San Francisco to Reno in the evening, with a return flight out early the next day. It was quite the incentive for the binge gambler: two free drinks, a free buffet dinner, and a reimbursement of $15 toward the airfare.10

Arriving early for his flight to Reno, Gonzales purchased $105,000 in air-accident insurance and then proudly displayed his new revolver to people at San Francisco International Airport, while he waited to board his flight. He supposedly even told one person that he planned to kill himself with the gun.11 Maybe if someone reported Gonzales to authorities, he might have been prevented from getting on the plane. Instead, nobody said a word.

In Reno, Gonzales decided to go for broke. According to news accounts, he had a run of bad luck at the tables. But losing his money didn't seem to faze him. As he reportedly told one dealer, “it won't make any difference after tomorrow.”12 Ready to die, on the morning of May 7, Gonzales boarded the return flight home, selecting a seat immediately behind the cockpit door. After a brief stop-over in Stockton, where two passengers deplaned and another ten boarded, Flight 773 took off for San Francisco. But exactly ten minutes into the flight, Gonzales entered the cockpit and shot the pilot and copilot before turning the gun on himself. With the pilots incapacitated, the Fairchild F-27A turboprop aircraft went into a steep descent, slamming into the ground at nearly a 90-degree angle moments later.13

Executing a cockpit crew was unprecedented until Gonzales's midair rampage in 1964. But the downing of Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 was a distressing wake-up call that passenger airplanes were extremely vulnerable to attack by anyone traveling with a weapon on his person. It forced federal regulators to come up with ways to prevent similar disasters in the future.

Let's say you're a policymaker back in 1964. What would you recommend to avert another attack like the assault on Flight 773?

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