THE passenger hit the call button and Janeene Christie, a 22-year-old TAA air hostess, went to help. A sawn-off .22 rifle was thrust at her throat, and the man demanded: “Get the captain.’’ It was July 19, 1960, and Australia’s — some argue the world’s — first commercial airliner hijacking was under way.

So unexpected was the assault that when Ms Christie alerted Captain John Denton to the demand, he laughed.

The laughter soon died on the John Gilbert, a turbo-prop Lockheed Electra, when a second hostess told them Alex Hildebrandt, a 22-year old Russian migrant, had a bomb — two sticks of gelignite attached to a battery.

What happened next is the stuff of Hollywood movies as the flight’s co pilot and an off-duty pilot dressed in civvies grappled with the renegade.

A shot was fired, punching a hole in the fuselage.

Eventually the hijacker was subdued helped by a well-placed blow of an axe.

But that was far from the end of the story of how terror first came to Australia’s skies.

Hijacker used money his mum gave him for a suit

THAT morning Hildebrandt’s mother had given him 18 pounds at their Riverstone, Sydney, home. He was to have used 8 pounds to pay a fine for having evaded a rail fare, and the other 10 was to have been paid off the price of a suit.

Instead, the 22-year-old used the money to buy a light-coloured duffle coat and an air ticket to Brisbane.

He was wearing the duffle coat when he went to Mascot to catch his flight to Brisbane a few hours later.

He had a ticket on the propjet Electra “John Gilbert’’ assigned to TAA Flight 408, the last Sydney-Brisbane service for the day.

It took off on schedule at 7.30pm and was on time for Eagle Farm. Thirty-five minutes after take-off air hostess Fay Strugnell placed a dispatch bag on the vacant seat beside Hildebrandt with the intention of putting some flight documents into it.

Miss Strugnell looked up to see Hildebrandt pointing a gun at her head from about 30cm away.

Playing for time, the hostess asked him to “wait a moment’’ and continued with her task.

“Get the captain or I’ll blow your head off,’’ he told her.

Miss Strugnell then went to the cabin and told him what had happened.

While she was gone, Hildebrandt menaced the second hostess, Janeene Christie, and demanded that she also “get the captain’’.

Miss Strugnell returned with the flight engineer, Fred McDonald. While she was talking to Hildebrandt, she saw two sticks of gelignite beside him and a battery in the seat arm ashtray.

Hildebrandt then threatened McDonald with the firearm and demanded that the airliner be diverted to Singapore.

It was then that First Officer Tom Bennett entered the cabin and became involved in the negotiations. While McDonald went back to the flight deck, ostensibly to check the aircraft’s fuel reserves, Hildebrandt pointed the gun at Bennett’s chest and indicated the bomb on the seat beside him.

He became agitated when Bennett told him the plane had to land in Brisbane, and it was then that he fired the shot.

A shot is fired

WHEN Alex Hildebrandt armed himself with a sawn-off rifle and a gelignite bomb and took the lives of 50 people into his hands on Flight 408, they didn’t even call it a hijack.

In those civilised days before the world’s terrorists discovered the vulnerability of civil aviation he was still a “bomber’’, or perhaps an “”air pirate’’. It was only years later that such people became “skyjackers’’ _ and finally “hijackers’’.

None of that mattered to Tom Bennett that night. Bennett was co-pilot of Flight 408 and all his faculties were concentrated on how the lives of the 43 passengers and six other crew might be saved.

Hildebrandt sat before him with the sawn-off .22 calibre rifle in one hand, and a bare wire hovering over a torch battery reposing in the seat arm ashtray in the other.

One end of that wire was connected to a detonator stuck in two sticks of gelignite lying on the vacant seat next to Hildebrandt.

Another wire ran from the battery to the gelignite.

“I don’t know how I decided that the time was right to jump him. I know we were not getting anywhere, and I had this thought that it was time to take control.

“Then I did make my move, I just grabbed for the gelignite and threw a punch at him at the same time.’’

He had already escaped shooting by a hair’s breadth before he grabbed for the bomb.

Hildebrandt had fired a shot from the sawn-off rifle only 38cm from his chest. The bullet went over his shoulder and through the airliner’s roof.

When he grabbed the bomb, the first officer pulled the wires from the hijacker’s hand and the gelignite fell to the floor.

As Bennett kept punching the sitting man, a second TAA pilot, Dennis Lawrence, rose from the seat behind the hijacker and clobbered him with the heavy rubberised handle of a fire axe.

Capt Lawrence, an off-duty TAA executive from Papua New Guinea, was wearing civvies. He had been alerted by a hostess to what was happening and had gone to the plane’s forward cabin unobtrusively and returned to take the seat behind Hildebrandt with the axe hidden under his jacket.

When he applied it to Hildebrandt’s skull, the hijack was over.

The man with the axe

IT was while Bennett was trying to calm the hijacker that Capt Lawrence went into the cockpit and returned to the seat behind Hildebrandt with the fire axe hidden under his jacket.

Moments later Bennett grabbed for the bomb and Dennis Lawrence brought the axe handle into play.

After he was overpowered, Hildebrandt was kept under guard by another pilot-passenger, Warren Penny,.

Lawrence handed the axe to Penny and told him: “If he moves, smash him across the skull.’’

Penny said: “If he’d batted an eye, I would have let him have it.’’

Hildebrandt was still pretty stunned, with blood dribbling from his mouth, but as the plane came in to land he started to recover.

“I couldn’t make much sense out of most of what he was saying, but he did say a couple of times that he had had enough, and that he was going to die.’’

Investigators found later that the sawn-off rifle was fully loaded, and that the hijacker had had a spare magazine also fully charged.

When the airliner landed at Eagle Farm at 9.25pm, police under Detective Inspector W.J. “”Bill’’ Cronau were waiting on the tarmac.

They boarded the aircraft and Det Sgt Merton Hopgood, a well-known Brisbane policeman of the time, arrested Hildebrandt on charges of having attempted to murder Bennett and having had an explosive device on the plane with intent to destroy it.

Det Insp Les Bardwell, a police firearms expert, was to find that the bomb would certainly have detonated had the second wire touched the battery.

Bennett, who retired from flying in 1982 because of a health problem, reckoned his memory of the hijack was hazy when interviewed 20 years after the drama.

But he did remember a rising anger that overtook him while he was confronting the hijacker.

“I thought to myself: “What right have you got to take over the lives of all these people when they are just going about their peaceful business?’

“It just made me so angry.’’

He recalled that Hildebrandt insisted the aircraft should not land in Brisbane, although he tried to persuade him it did not have enough fuel to go anywhere else.

To ensure the hijacker did not become excited by seeing the city lights, Capt Denton flew the Electra out over Moreton Bay and kept it circling there while the drama was unfolding.

Ron McCabe was a young RAAF airman on his way home on sick leave when he witnessed the drama of the hijack.

When The Sunday Mail caught up with him 35 years after the event, he still had a letter from the general manager of TAA written to passengers who were on the hijacked plane.

“It has come to my notice that you were a passenger aboard our Electra “John Gilbert’ when the unfortunate incident of 20 July (the date was wrong!) occurred,’’ the masterpiece of understatement said.

“I would like to convey to you the sincere apologies of this airline for such an unpleasant incident having occurred, and I hope that you were in no way inconvenienced by the events which took place.’’

The letter went on to praise the calmness of the passengers and the actions of the crew.

It later emerged that Hildebrandt was born at Patoka, Russia, on May 30, 1938, and was taken to Germany when he was only a few months old because his father disagreed with the Communists.

His parents spent the war years in German labour camps, and he had little schooling.

The family came to Australia under the displaced persons migration scheme in 1950 and lived in migrant camps in Victoria and NSW before settling at Riverstone, near Sydney.

Hildebrandt had worked at various jobs and had a couple of convictions for minor offences.

A lawyer who appeared for him at his trial in Brisbane claimed Hildebrandt had a persecution complex caused by his father’s ill-treatment of him. The hijacker believed he was being victimised because employers only ever gave him labouring work.

Psychiatrists had found he had a paranoid personality.

The aftermath

THERE was a bizarre legal complication in the aftermath of the hijack.

Hildebrandt faced three serious charges in court _ having attempted to murder First Officer Bennett; having put explosives, including a detonating device, in an aircraft with intent to destroy it; and having put explosives on an aircraft in such a way that they might cause injuries to persons on board.

He was found guilty on all charges. For attempted murder, he was jailed for three years; for having attempted to destroy the airliner, he was given 10 years; and on the lesser explosives charge he received two years.

But Hildebrandt went to the Queensland Court of Criminal Appeal on the 10-year sentence, and argued successfully that as the plane was still over NSW _ it was, in fact somewhere near Casino _ when he armed the explosives in its lavatory, the Queensland court had no jurisdiction on that offence.

He served the three-year sentence, and as he left jail in Brisbane was re-arrested by NSW detectives and taken to Sydney to again face a charge of having attempted to destroy the airliner. He was again convicted and sent to prison for seven years.