Frederick Hahneman

Bureau of Prisons records show Frederick Hahneman was paroled on March 13, 1984. On August 17, 1984, he was discharged. The Bureau has no further records of him.

Mary Hahneman maintained that she had no contact with her husband and didn't even know he'd been released. Asked after his 1984 discharge, she said, "I still don't know why he did it. If you ever find out, will you please tell me?"

On May 8, 1973, the FBI announced they had recovered the $303,000 ransom. In the press release, they said that a check was made through the National Crime Information Center, which determined the serial numbers tallied with the ransom money. They provided no further details of how or where they recovered the money.

On May 2, 1972, Hahneman checked into the Americus hotel in Allentown as a well dressed businessman under the assumed name George Ames. Staff remembered him as "polite" but got the impression that Ames had "put up a wall around himself". After asking directions to a travel agent, staff later reported Ames saying he was "going to take a plane" later that morning.

On September 11, 1972, Hahneman waived his right to a jury trial and pleaded guilty to a charge of air piracy, kidnapping and extortion. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 29, 1972, in the US District Court in Alexandria, Va, and sent to the federal prison in Atlanta.

The period 1967–1972 saw a spate of aircraft hijackings in the United States and worldwide. There had been 26 attempted hijackings in 1971 alone, 11 of them successful. So common were they that the May 8 Evening Chronicle editorial of 1972 stated, "They often command little more than one-column, six-paragraph stories on page 8 of most daily newspapers."

Hahneman was born in Puerto Castilla, Honduras, to a Honduran mother, Delia Pastore Ordóñez, and an American father, the late William Frederick Hahneman, of San Francisco. It is not known when he was naturalized but he had lived in Easton, Pennsylvania, since 1960. He was an engineer and married to Mary Jane Hahneman. They had two sons. Neighbours of the couple told investigators later that Hahneman was a "mystery" to them and that Mary, going blind, raised the children alone.

Frederick William Hahneman (July 5, 1922 – December 17, 1991) was a Honduras-born US citizen convicted of hijacking Eastern Air Lines Flight 175 from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Miami, Florida, on May 5, 1972.