Pilot holds new York hostage

"This is the first airplane hostage situation in the history of the world with New York City as the hostage."

That was how the police department described yesterday's bizarre incident in which a dissatisfied Australian writer threatened to crash his aircraft into a New York skyscraper.

The first word of the threat came at 10.20 a.m. when a police department official telephoned the United Nations and informed the Secretary General that a lunatic pilot in the area planned to fly his plane into the UN building. The UN was evacuated; bomb disposal squads and fire teams moved onto the UN grounds to cope with the threatened disaster. Traffic outside the UN was rerouted and no one was allowed on First Avenue but reporters.

Then the police corrected their original report. The target of the pilot, Richard Boudin, was not the UN, but the publishing company of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, housed in a building two blocks from the UN. Mr. Boudin apparently felt that his novel, Confessions of a Promiscuous Coun­terfeiter, was not getting enough publicity, so he chartered the plane at a New Jersey airport and radioed that he was going to destroy the publishing house.

Soon after noon the president of the publishing company agreed to talk with Mr. Boudin, if he would land at La Guardia Airport. Mr. Boudin accepted and flew off, the crisis over.

Police said Mr. Boudin would be charged with reckless endangerment and other offences.