Please Help Me Find A Book!!!!

Hello,
I'm new to this forum and I truly hope that someone can help me find this story/book/author.....I've been searching for it for years with no luck.....I read it in one of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books......Maybe in teh 60's or 70's so it's old....

The problem is that it was a spanish traslation and it's proven to be even more difficult to find. I believe the title was something like "Flight (# some number) in Danger" or something like that was the title in spanish so it could've changed. It's about a Vietnam fighter plane pilot that fakes his own death and hides the plane (vertical landing plane)he was flying in an island. Later he comes back in a yatch with mannequins pretending to be rich civilians and goes back to the island were he hid the plane. He sinks the yatch and takes the plane which he camouflaged in the island. He brings the plane back to California. This guy had a huge plan to rob some gold from different banks in California using the stolen plane to threaten a US Senator in commercial flight, forcing authorities to call the banks to let his thief friends take gold bars from several banks. His thief friends are all dressed in Santa Claus customes and they finally steal the gold and take it to a specific airport and pack a water-landing-airplane with gold. When they let the pilot(guy with the plan) know they got the gold and he fakes a nosedive crash with the plane and dissapears into no-radar zone and meets his friends. They later take the gold-filled water-plane to the San Francisco coast and sink it. Ten years later, so that no one remembers the robbery, they come back to the spot where they sunk the plane and they take the gold.......This is a long story I know, but that's what I remember. I would love you very much if you help me find this book or the author.

Thank you so much...

JC