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The crime evoked a touch of nostalgia, tracing back to an era when political activism and crime sometimes went hand in hand. Hijackings, especially to Cuba, seemed commonplace.

Luis Armando Peña Soltren was one of three men accused of hijacking of Pan American Flight 281, bound for Puerto Rico but taken to Cuba on Nov. 24, 1968. The other two men have long since pleaded guilty and served their sentences.

After 40 years living as a fugitive in Cuba, Mr. Soltren, now 67, received his sentence in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday.

He walked slowly into the courtroom, with short, silvery hair and bowed shoulders. Then he stood before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein and read for 15 minutes from a piece of paper.

Through an interpreter, he apologized to the court, to his family and to the passengers and crew of the plane he helped hijack. Mr. Soltren, who surrendered to United States authorities in 2009 and pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiracy to commit air piracy, interfering with flight crew members and kidnapping, attributed his misdeeds to “lack of experience, lack of patience and lack of maturity.”

He then asked the judge for leniency, saying, “I beg you to please take into consideration my age today and that I turned myself in voluntarily, completely voluntarily, to justice in this country.”

Judge Hellerstein was unmoved, sentencing Mr. Soltren to 15 years in a federal prison without the possibility of parole. His lawyers had asked for a sentence of no more than four years.

“I try to imagine how I would feel if someone put a knife to my throat or a gun to my back, and I wonder how many nightmares would follow,” Judge Hellerstein told the defendant. “I wonder even in your private moments with God whether there can ever be enough remorse.”

The proceeding resolved one of the more unusual hijacking stories in recent decades, one that Mr. Soltren said was motivated by familial ties rather than political ideology. He said that he joined a group of radical Puerto Rican nationalists in hijacking Flight 281, because he wanted to visit his ailing father in Cuba. And, he said, he returned to the United States — where prison time was all but assured — because he wanted to be with his wife, who left Cuba for the United States in 2004.

State Department officials said that the Cuban government had given its authorization for Mr. Soltren, who is a United States citizen, to leave Havana, but that no negotiations over the matter had taken place. His return was not part of any formal extradition process, the officials added. Mr. Soltren had been in contact with the United States Interests Section in Havana for some years and had expressed a desire to return, government officials said.

During the hijacking, Mr. Soltren and two other men took control of the Boeing 707 armed with knives and guns that they had smuggled aboard. They ordered the pilot to divert the flight to Havana, and as the plane approached José Martí International Airport, it received an escort from Cuban MiG-21 air force jets. Nobody was injured during the hijacking, and the crew and passengers were returned to the United States.

The others who joined Mr. Soltren on the plane, José Rafael Rios Cruz and Miguel Castro, were sentenced in the mid-1970s to 15 and 12 years in prison, respectively, for threatening the lives of flight crew members, but served sentences of seven years and four years.

A fourth man who was not on the flight, but was described then as a leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, was charged as a co-conspirator, but was acquitted at trial.

In a letter to Judge Hellerstein, Mr. Soltren’s lawyer, James Neuman, asked that his client serve fewer than four years in prison. He wrote that Mr. Soltren was sincerely remorseful and had begun contacting United States authorities in 1979 with the aim of surrendering.

“Unlike his co-defendants, Mr. Soltren never committed any other crime and was never even arrested, before or after this hijacking,” Mr. Neuman wrote. “No conceivable justification exists for treating Mr. Soltren more harshly than his co-defendants.”

But federal prosecutors asked in their own letter for “a lengthy term of imprisonment.” They wrote that Mr. Soltren should not be credited with trying to return to the United States before 2009 because he ended various earlier communications with the authorities when they did not agree to conditions that he had established for his surrender.

In addition, prosecutors said, Mr. Soltren had behaved violently aboard Flight 281, holding a knife to the neck of a flight attendant and pointing a .38 caliber Colt Cobra at the flight engineer.

“The defendant’s crimes placed in grave danger more than one hundred people,” the prosecutors wrote, adding: “The occupants of the airplane were required to endure a period of substantial fear.”

After issuing his sentence, Judge Hellerstein permitted Mr. Soltren’s wife, Silvia González Peña, and one of his four daughters, Yanira, to speak briefly with him before he was led from the courtroom.

Mr. Soltren, wearing dark-blue prison clothes, slumped in a wooden chair and appeared to blink back tears as the two women spoke to him in a mixture of Spanish and English.

“I love you so much,” Yanira said. Mr. Soltren nodded and a moment later he rose and returned to a cell.