FedEx Flight 705 Hijacking: Attack, Trial, and Life Sentence

The FedEx Flight 705 hijacking was a failed attempt on April 7, 1994, by an off-duty FedEx flight engineer, Auburn Calloway, to seize and deliberately crash a Memphis-to-San Jose DC-10 cargo jet using hammers, a knife, and a spear gun he had carried aboard in a guitar case. Calloway attacked the three-man crew shortly after takeoff, fracturing skulls and nearly severing one pilot’s ear, but Captain David Sanders, First Officer Jim Tucker, and Flight Engineer Andy Peterson fought him off in the cockpit and landed the plane back at Memphis. All three suffered career-ending injuries. Calloway was convicted of attempted aircraft piracy and is serving a life sentence in federal prison.¹

Why Calloway Attacked the Plane

Calloway was a FedEx flight engineer who had been ordered to appear at a disciplinary hearing on April 8, 1994, the day after the flight. The company had opened an investigation into how he reported his flight hours and had discovered that he had falsified his employment application. A fellow FedEx employee later noted that falsifying company documents would not necessarily have led to termination, but Calloway apparently saw the situation as catastrophic.²

His plan, prosecutors later argued, was to kill the crew, crash the aircraft, and stage his death as an accident so his family could collect on his life insurance. In the days before the flight he sent roughly $40,000 in securities and nearly $14,000 in cashier’s checks to his former wife. He also visited FedEx’s employee benefits office to change the beneficiaries on his accidental death and dismemberment policy and his term life insurance policy. Investigators later recovered a note on the plane addressed to his ex-wife that the court described as reflecting “the author’s apparent despair,” along with a separate note listing the weapons he had brought aboard.¹

How He Got Weapons on Board

Calloway boarded Flight 705 as a “jump-seater,” a common arrangement that lets off-duty crew members hitch a ride in the cockpit. He carried a guitar case containing two claw hammers, two sledgehammers, a knife, and a spear gun. As a FedEx employee he was able to bypass standard security screening under employee exemptions that existed at the time.³

The Attack in the Cockpit

Minutes after the DC-10 took off from Memphis, Calloway attacked the crew from behind with the hammers. He was physically imposing at six feet two inches and a trained martial artist.² Tucker’s skull was fractured almost immediately. Peterson suffered a skull fracture and a severed temporal artery. Sanders was struck repeatedly in the head and had his right ear nearly severed. Calloway also tried to gouge out Tucker’s eye, leaving him partially blind in it.¹

The crew realized quickly that this was not a hijacking with demands. Peterson and Sanders engaged Calloway in hand-to-hand combat while Tucker, bleeding from his fractured skull, stayed at the controls.² To throw Calloway off balance, Tucker deliberately put the DC-10 through violent aerial maneuvers no cargo jet was designed to perform. He pitched the nose up, rolled the plane to bank angles of up to 140 degrees — nearly inverted — and threw it into steep dives. The aircraft reportedly reached speeds faster than any other DC-10 in recorded history and pushed close to its structural limits.⁴

By the time the struggle ended, Tucker was paralyzed on his right side and could no longer fly the plane. Sanders took the controls. The DC-10 was still fully loaded with fuel and cargo for a cross-country flight and was roughly 16,000 kilograms over its maximum designed landing weight. The crew was too badly hurt to leave their seats and jettison fuel. Sanders came in too fast and too high but brought the aircraft down safely at Memphis International Airport. A paramedic handcuffed Calloway as soon as the plane stopped, and all three crew members were rushed to the hospital.⁴

What Happened to the Crew

All three survived. None ever flew commercially again.²

Tucker had the worst of it. He suffered a depressed skull fracture and a subdural hematoma from the hammer blows. About a week after the attack he developed a brain abscess that required a craniotomy. In 1996 he underwent a cranioplasty to replace the removed bone flap with a polymer acrylic implant, and he was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. He spent two and a half years in intensive physical, speech, cognitive, and occupational therapy, re-learning how to read, write, and speak. He was left with permanent right-side numbness and limited stamina, and his neurologist told him the injuries would permanently disqualify him from airline flying.⁵ Tucker later settled in Headland, Alabama, served as a lay pastor, and sat on the local airport authority board. In 2004 he returned to general aviation, flying a 1946 Luscombe 8A under light-sport medical self-certification rules.⁶

Peterson sustained a skull fracture and a severed temporal artery. Sanders suffered deep head gashes, a dislocated jaw, a stab wound to his right arm, and had his right ear surgically reattached.¹ Their recovery was described as more complete than doctors had initially expected, but the head injuries were too serious for any of them to return to a commercial cockpit.

The Trial and Life Sentence

Calloway was arrested on April 10, 1994. A federal grand jury in the Western District of Tennessee returned a two-count indictment on May 17 charging him with attempted aircraft piracy and interference with flight crew members. He pleaded not guilty and was held pending trial.⁷ His defense gave notice of an insanity defense, and he was sent to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric evaluation. When the case reached trial, the jury deliberated three and a half hours before rejecting the insanity defense and finding him guilty on both counts on March 30, 1995.⁸

The district court imposed concurrent life sentences and departed upward from the federal sentencing guidelines, raising the offense level from 38 to 43, the highest level. The court cited four reasons:

The crime involved multiple victims, including the three crew members and FedEx as a company.
All three crew members suffered skull fractures or other grave injuries that ended their careers.
FedEx incurred over $800,000 in property damage.
The plane could have crashed into a populated area of Memphis.

Those findings were detailed in the Sixth Circuit’s later opinion affirming the sentence.¹

Appeals

Calloway appealed to the Sixth Circuit on six grounds, challenging a search of his apartment, the sufficiency of the piracy evidence, jury instructions, an amendment to the indictment, the separate interference charge, and the upward sentencing departure. On June 20, 1997, the court affirmed his conviction and life sentence for attempted aircraft piracy. It vacated the separate conviction for interference with flight crew members, agreeing with the government’s concession that it was a lesser-included offense of the piracy charge. On the other arguments the court found no reversible error and called the evidence of Calloway’s guilt “overwhelming.”¹

He has continued to file challenges. In 2025 he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, challenging a February 2025 Sixth Circuit decision. Justice Kavanaugh granted him an extension to file. The Supreme Court docketed the petition in January 2026 and denied it on February 23, 2026. Calloway filed for rehearing, which was denied on May 26, 2026. He remains in federal prison serving a life sentence.⁹

The Aircraft

The DC-10-30F involved, tail number N306FE, was repaired and returned to FedEx service. Originally delivered to the company on January 24, 1986, it was later converted to the MD-10-30F designation in April 2008 and continued hauling cargo for nearly three more decades. FedEx retired its last MD-10 freighters at the end of 2022, and N306FE made its final flight on December 31, 2022, from Toronto to Memphis, 28 years after the attack that nearly destroyed it.¹⁰

1
FindLaw. United States v. Calloway, No. 95-6206
2
Memphis Commercial Appeal. FedEx Plane Hijacking: Flight 705
3
State Aviation Journal. Life Changer: Horrific Story of FedEx Flight 705
4
Aerotime Hub. Today in History: FedEx Flight 705 Attempted Hijacking
5
AVweb. Jim Tucker
6
AOPA. Jim Tucker
7
CourtListener. United States v. Calloway, 2:94-cr-20112
8
Tampa Bay Times. Former Pilot Guilty of Attack at 18,000 Feet
9
Supreme Court of the United States. Auburn Calloway v. United States, No. 25-6516
10
Simple Flying. FedEx Historic MD-10 Rescue