Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 710

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 710 was a Boeing 737-200 flight between the California cities of Sacramento and Burbank, with a stop in San Francisco, that was hijacked by two Bulgarian nationals on July 5, 1972, shortly after take-off from Sacramento Airport. The hijackers demanded $800,000, two parachutes and to be taken to the Soviet Union. The plane landed at the San Francisco Airport, then took off after 20 minutes and spent the next hour circling while the hijackers waited for the airline to accept their demands.

The hijacking ended on the runway at San Francisco International Airport when four agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation stormed the plane, killing both hijackers. Passenger E. H. Stanley Carter, a 66-year-old retired railroad conductor from Montreal, was also killed; passengers Leo R. Gormley, a recently retired railroad conductor of Los Angeles, and actor Victor Sen Yung were wounded but survived. They were the first passengers killed or wounded in a hijacking in the United States. The hijackers were identified as 28-year-old Dimitr Alexiev of Hayward, California, and 28-year-old Michael Dimitrov Azmanoff, of unknown residence.

Hijacking

Azmanoff, a 28-year-old Bulgarian refugee who had once served as an Army truck driver, boarded the Boeing 737 in San Francisco with his friend, Dimitr Alexiev. As soon as the seat-belt sign was switched off, the hijackers produced pistols and made their demands: $800,000 in small bills, two parachutes, and the navigation charts necessary to get them to Siberia. The plane returned to San Francisco, where the hijackers agreed to take on a new pilot with international experience. As the pilot approached the idling plane, the hijackers forced him to strip down to his underwear, to make sure he wasn't armed. The pilot, who was an FBI agent in disguise, did so slowly, so that a team of agents armed with shotguns could sneak up on the aircraft; these agents had evaded detection by approaching in a boat in the surrounding bay. The faux pilot was eventually cleared to board; he was followed by his fellow agents, who wildly opened fire in the cabin. Alexiev, who was standing by the cockpit, was killed instantly, but Azmanoff hunkered down in the rear of the plane and conducted a gun battle with the agents. He was killed in the melee, along with Carter, the retired railroad conductor. Two more passengers were injured, including Victor Sen Yung, the San Francisco-born actor who played the popular cook, Hop Sing, on the long-running Western television series Bonanza and the character Jimmy Chan in the popular Charlie Chan series of films starting in 1938.