Cathay Pacific Airways PBY Catalina amphibious aircraft Miss Macao ashore at Kai Tak Airport.

It is claimed that: "The first act of piracy for gain in the history of aviation" took place aboard a PBY Catalina flying boat named Miss Macao owned by Cathay Pacific Airways, which was hijacked during a flight between Macau and Hong Kong on 16 July, 1948.

Until this century, the Pearl River Delta had been a hotbed of piracy. Neither Imperial China nor its successor, the Kuomintang, was able to control it. Neither was the British Royal Navy. In 1948, there was still a civil war going on in China, and Canton (Guangzhou) was still in Nationalist hands.

Macau was technically a province of Portugal. That country had not joined the International Monetary Fund and was therefore not obliged to obey its rules on the import of gold. Macau became the headquarters of the world's biggest gold syndicate which stubbornly refused to reveal the names of its customers. The press had great fun writing stories on Macau's alleged smuggling industry.

Two years before the Cathay hijack, Fu Tak-yam, the boss of this syndicate, had been kidnapped while enjoying a pipe of opium in a Buddhist retreat, and his family had to pay an enormous ransom. Kidnapping has always been a national sport among the Chinese criminal community. Many of the Cathay seaplane's regular passengers were extremely wealthy. They were a tempting target. It was later reported that the luggage of one of the passengers, Wong Chung-ping, a millionaire Macau bullion dealer, contained 3,000 taels of gold.

Chiu Tok, the hijack gang's leader, was a qualified pilot who had been trained to fly Catalinas in the Philippines. The hijackers’ plan was to force the aircraft down near a remote island off the China coast where they could conceal the plane and hold their captives prisoner.

Having invested 20 patacas each in lightweight European suits, the four hijackers boarded the plane at Macau. Chiu Tok sat directly behind the American pilot Dale Cramer, and a few minutes after take-off demanded at gunpoint that Cramer hand over the controls – Cramer refused!

Chiu Tok struggled with Cramer, and another pirate, Chiu Cheong, who had been covering the first officer, Australian Ken McDuff, tried to help Chiu Tok. McDuff picked up an iron mooring flag and clobbered him. Pandemonium broke out as the passengers desperately fought the hijackers.

Chiu Tok panicked and shot Cramer who collapsed onto the controls, sending the plane hurtling towards the sea.

Two fishermen aboard a junk saw the plane crash into the water. They found an unconscious man floating nearby. He was Wong Yu-man, a rice farmer and the only survivor of Miss Macao. He was wearing a European style suit. They took him to Macau where he refused to say anything. Then the body of one of the passengers was found with a bullet wound, and it became a case of air-piracy. Gavin Young in his book Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways described Wong's behaviour:

"At first he was incoherent, so a recording device was concealed near his hospital bed. In addition police officers disguised as patients were placed in neighbouring beds, and from time to time elderly ‘relatives’ came to sit by them and hold their hands. In time Wong told all he knew..."

In the 1940s there was no existing legislation in either Hong Kong or Macau to cover air-piracy over international waters. It simply had not happened before. Wong spent three years in jail in Macau before being deported in 1951 to The People's Republic of China. There were plenty of rumours, but he was never heard of again.