It seems hard to imagine now, but in the 1960s and 1970s huge numbers of scheduled flights were hijacked, most of them by lone madmen armed to the teeth.
It was literally a different era. Internal flights in the US were incredibly cheap and there was no security. Nowadays, as we all know, you cannot take nail scissors on a plane and it is assumed by all security services that a tube of toothpaste is full of Semtex. (Is there such a thing as minty Semtex?)
But then the average privateer would board with at least one powerful weapon, possibly a few grenades and sticks of dynamite around his waist. He wanted $500,000 and a parachute, and prepared to jump out of the rear entrance of the plane, because anyone jumping out of the front entrance would be sucked into the jets and killed in a rather unpleasant manner. (Ugh.)
Composite FBI sketches of Dan Cooper, who hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in 1971
The hijacker, the man who made all this possible, was a man who called himself DB Cooper, but almost certainly went by another name. He bailed out with $200,000, which in 1972 was worth $1.5 million in today’s money, and was never heard from again.
FBI agents looked for a large hole and a squashed Cooper at the bottom of it, but found nothing. They continued to search for him for forty years before closing the case and making it ‘unsolved’.
He was the undisputed inspiration for countless half-hearted wannabes, all male (but of course), most between 25 and 45 years old, and many of them doomed to die in a hail of bullets.
I Am DB Cooper movie poster, released in 2002
The man writing about all this is John Wigger, an academic from the American Midwest whose previous books dealt with American Methodists and the dodgy evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Although much of this happened fifty years ago, many of the key players are still alive and have given him detailed interviews.
The result is an incredibly rich stew about the Great Era of the Hijacking, with more detail than anyone could ever hope for.
We learn what these people wore, the cars they drove, the weapons they favored, and while favorite yogurt flavors haven’t surfaced yet, I’ll keep an eye out.
An important revelation is that hijackers usually sat in the back row of the plane, because then you could sit wherever you wanted.
Not only was this more convenient for the toilet, but it would also cause maximum damage to the plane if you happened to detonate a bomb there.
Also useful for the back stairs if you have escaped.
Then who were these idiots? Many had a history of emotional trauma, often in the form of PTSD from military service, and previous brushes with the law and time in prison.
Money recovered from a skyjacking case in the Pacific Northwest
They had recently experienced a setback, an event that left them desperate to put things right.
They were daring, but not criminally sophisticated. They constructed elaborate plans and devised cunning schemes involving secret devices and operatives on the ground.
Above all, they wanted to feel respected and thought (wrongly) that hijacking a plane would be the quickest route to do so.
However, one privateer, Richard McCoy, was “the personification of Central America.” “He was very conservative in his manner, dress and speech,” said a fellow student.
As was the case with other hijackers, this one had the ability to suspend conscience and shut out the larger consequences of what he did.
He was captured, sentenced to 45 years in prison, escaped and died in the usual hail of bullets when the FBI caught up with him.
Oddly enough, the agency provides the comedy the book has to offer. So at one point the men refueling the plane all had “shiny black shoes” and neatly cut hair.
They might as well have been wearing fedoras, which were still the norm for J. Edgar Hoover’s men in the early 1970s, decades after they had gone out of fashion.
One officer drives a 1950s car that looked like an “inverted bathtub on wheels.” Snipers keep almost shooting flight attendants who always get in the way.
The hijacked Northwest Airlines 727 jet sits on a Washington runway in 1971
It’s actually a minor miracle they ever caught anyone. “In 1972, the decision-making process on hijackings was divided between the FBI, the airline, the FAA, airport security and local police.” It was the classic bureaucratic mess.
Nowadays, of course, you would do very well to board the plane with a bottle of water, let alone the gelignite and firearms that were so popular at the time.
I wonder if something wasn’t lost along the way, even though at least now you know where you’re flying to: there won’t be any sudden detours to Cuba.
Wigger’s hugely entertaining book delves into previously unexplored territory of aviation history and, to be safe, is probably best read on dry land.