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Capt John Testrake died in Feb 1996 at the age of 68
Capt. John L. Testrake, the Bible-reading T.W.A. pilot whose display of calm, quiet courage made him an international hero during a 17-day hijacking ordeal between Beirut and Algiers in 1985, died yesterday at a hospice in St. Joseph, Mo. He was 68 and had been suffering from cancer.
A native of Ripley, N.Y., who joined the Navy right after high school at the end of World War II and and later served as a flight engineer in the Korean War, Captain Testrake was a lifelong aviation enthusiast who had spent more than 30 years flying domestic runs for T.W.A. when he made what turned out to be a fateful decision in the early 1980's.
With mandatory retirement just a few years away, he began signing up for international routes, often meeting his second wife, Phyllis, for sightseeing excursions during his overseas layovers.
She was waiting for him on June 14, 1985, when he took off from Athens for what should have been a short hop to Rome.
Instead, within 20 minutes after the Boeing 727 designated Flight 847 took off with 150 passengers and crew members, a band of terrorists armed with pistols and grenades commandeered the plane and threatened to blow it up if Israel did not release Arab prisoners held in southern Lebanon.
The hijacking began a peripatetic 17-day ordeal of casual torture and gratuitous brutality during which many passengers and crew members were severely beaten, an American Navy man was killed and the original hijackers were replaced on the plane by two separate radical bands. By the time the last passengers were released with Captain Testrake, he had been forced to make two round trips between Beirut and Algiers, landing at Beirut three times.
Through it all, Captain Testrake was as an island of calm.
Captain Testrake, whose radio transmissions were broadcast around the world, followed the hijackers' orders when he had to, but thought nothing of scolding them when they made demands he felt would endanger the flight.
One of the most indelible and frightening television images of the ordeal occurred when Captain Testrake was leaning out of the cockpit window giving an interview to a news crew at the Beirut airport when one of the hijackers intervened, waving a pistol around the pilot's head.
Captain Testrake, who had previously brushed aside his fear when a hijacker plopped a bomb in his lap and had gained his captors' respect, later shrugged off the incident. "I knew the guy," he said.
Upon his return to the United States, Captain Testrake was given a hero's welcome in his boyhood home of Ripley and his hometown of Richmond, Mo.
After his retirement in 1987 he began what amounted to an airborne lay ministry, flying the small plane he kept at his Missouri home to speaking engagements around the country.
He also ventured into politics, gaining the Republican nomination for a House seat in 1992 but losing in the general election.
Captain Testrake's first wife died in 1976, and two of his children died in accidents.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, John, of St. Louis; two daughters, Deborah Barnes of Lee's Summit, Mo., and Dianne Smith of St. Louis; two stepsons, Russell Hiser of Kansas City, Mo., and Jeffrey Hiser of Richmond, Mo.; a stepdaughter, Cindy Martin of St. Joseph, Mo.; two brothers, Roger of Ripley, and Richard of Erie, Pa.; a sister, Faith Testrake of Lakewood, N.Y., and 13 grandchildren.
