A nightmare in the sky ‘THERE’S A BOMB ON THE PLANE!’
The bizarre true story behind the $500,000 Qantas hoax
As flight QF755 soared through the sky on its way from Sydney to Hong Kong, its 128 unsuspecting passengers had no idea of the horrifying phone call a “Mr Brown” had just made to Qantas bosses.
“There’s an explosive on board,” Mr Brown had said. “It will detonate as the plane comes into land unless my demands for $500,000 are met.”
It was May 26, 1971, and that call began an almost unbelievable chain of events that ended in Australia’s greatest and most audacious plane robbery.
In his call to Qantas headquarters, the English-accented Mr Brown went on to explain the bomb was made from 24 sticks of gelignite and if the plane descended below 6000 metres, it would explode.
To prove he wasn’t bluffing, he said he’d made an identical bomb that was hidden in a locker at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport.
Army experts quickly found this bomb and confirmed Mr Brown’s claims.
Now the frenzied Qantas executives were in an impossible position. The pilot, Captain William Selwyn, had told passengers they were returning to Sydney due to a technical issue but, after circling for hours above the specified altitude, his plane was running out of fuel.
Police were advising not to pay the ransom but with the safety of its passengers in jeopardy, Qantas executives decided they had to.
DISGUISED GETAWAY
Authorities received word that a yellow Kombi would park outside Qantas company headquarters at 5.45pm, and that the driver would identify himself by shaking his keys out of the window. The caller warned the vehicle could not be followed, and if it was, he would activate the bomb on flight 755.
Desperate to save those on board, the airline’s chief Bert Ritchie took two suitcases full of cash to the entrance of Qantas House, as per the bomber’s
instructions, where Mr Brown – later discovered to be 37-year-old Englishman Peter Macari – was wearing a wig, fake moustache and glasses, and sitting in a stolen van.
‘It will detonate unless my demands are met’
The money was loaded in the back and Macari drove away.
Police were waiting to catch the crook with four unmarked cars containing officers who – on the signal given by other police inside Qantas House – would pounce on the vehicle.
But in an almighty blunder, the detectives who were planning to arrest Macari were accidentally locked in a lift.
“Unfortunately, the plan didn’t go the way in which it was designed,” Police Commissioner Norman Allen said of his men’s work.
Fortunately for Macari, it went exactly as he had planned. The icing on the cake was his call to Qantas as he escaped with half a million dollars.
“There’s no bomb aboard the plane,” he admitted at last.
The Boeing 707 was free to descend, which it did without incident.
For authorities this was by no means the end of the story though, and it sparked a huge manhunt for Mr Brown.
In the end it was his own stupidity that gave him and his accomplice, Raymond James Poynting, away. Instead of lying low, both men were splashing their newfound wealth, arousing suspicion, and ultimately leading to their own downfall.
STOLE THE IDEA
In August 1971, Macari was finally arrested.
It was discovered that Macari, who’d arrived in Australia on a fake passport, got the hoax idea from the 1966 film The Doomsday Flight in which passengers of a commercial jet are at the mercy of a madman’s bomb set to explode below 4000 feet.
Both men pleaded guilty and Poynting was sentenced to seven years in prison, while Macari was handed 15 years for his part in the hoax.
Over the years, some of the cash was recovered when a police search of Macari’s property in Annandale uncovered $138,240 in $20 notes behind a bricked-up fireplace. In July 1973, a further $137,000 was found in a Balmain home after a tenant noticed something odd about the floorboards.
It was later revealed that Macari had hidden in the house for a few days after the extortion.
However, most of the money remains missing, with one theory being that it was sunk off Bondi Beach.
Macari was deported to the UK in 1980 – ironically on a Qantas plane – and is said to have died in 2013, after nine years in prison.