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Old 19th May 2011, 08:06
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qfcabin
 
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: sydney. australia
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I think you will find that the Bill Selwyn in the photograph went onto Qantas 707.
I am also pretty sure that he was the captain on the famous Mr Brown flight to HKG in early 70s. An early attempt to get a lot of money from QF. The crook notified Qantas after the flight was airborne that he had placed a device onboard that would explode descending thru 20,000ft or so.
A/C was at cruise by now. Much ado in Sydney while Selwyn , who incidentally was one of the calmest, most laconic men I ever knew,had his crew tear the aircraft apart searching for the device.
Chief exec of QF had a mill or so in a bag to hand over to the crook, but the cops lost the bad guy during the escape...no bomb found on board, and my memory is that Selwyn had to descend without that knowlwdge..Scary times.
It took a long time for the cops to get the crook but he was eventually convicted.
I remember this reasonably well because i was part of the cabin crew waiting in HKG to work that service back to Sydney that evening.
When we were briefed about what had happened, we did not believe it. This was very early days of this sort of thing. Most of those happenings were hijacks to Cuba in the US.
I'm sure others will have better memories of this man and this incident; just my two bobs worth.
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