Elmer's Plane episode

I was just reading an article by Ken Howell regarding an incident that happened to Elmer in November of 1974. Elmer was on flight 444, a 727 out of Chicago on the way to a seminar or something when there was smoke in the plane and they had to divert to land at Dulles Airport. Someone asked Elmer what had happened and he said there had been some loud thumps and then smoke so it must have been a fire.
Howell says he never found out until later, 1996, that the flight Elmer was on had been determined to have had a mail bomb go off in the baggage area of the plane, the authorities speculated or proved that it was the work of Ted Kaczynski,the guy responsible for all those bombings back then. The authorities figured the device went off but didn't cause enough damage to really hurt the plane and the resulting fire only smoldered. On the premise that this story is true I suspect Elmer probably never knew how lucky he was. Chris