MANIAC IN PLANE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 419, 30 July 1928, Page 12

MANIAC IN PLANE

PILOT STUNNED WITH HAMMER "DEATH IS MY MESSAGE” A maniac in an airplane suddenly attacked the pilot when they were 2,000 feet above ground near Pontiac, Michigan. The pilot’s name is Harry Anderson, and suddenly and without warning, { the insane passenger stunned him with a hammer. The machine fell into a nose-dive, but, 200 feet from the ground, Anderson came to sufficiently to right the plane, and both he and his mad pas- j senger, though badly hurt, live to tell the story. Anderson states that the passenger employed him for the flight, and then, as they approached the destination, suddenly started to belabour him with the hammer. One blow knocked out most of his teeth, and another knocked him unconscious. “I must have been unconscious for some time,” Anderson said, ‘‘for when I came to we were in a nose-dive. I pulled at the controls and tried to right the plane and slow her down. ‘‘Just as I was swinging out of the dive I felt the wheels of the undercarriage touch the ground for some distance and then the machine went over on her nose.” The machine, curiously enough, crashed in the grounds of a lunatic asylum. Both men were rushed to hospital, where a search of the crazed passenger revealed a letter, written to a woman, reading: “Death is my message, sweetheart.”