Nebe patří nám – Koerner Brendan Ian (2020)

Bonnie and Clyde in a hijacked plane. Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow forced the crew to fly across the Atlantic and land with the ransom in Algeria, only to later be celebrated by French intellectuals led by Jean-Paul Sartre. The act of a frustrated Vietnam War veteran and his beautiful girlfriend was not an isolated incident; between 1961 and 1973, there were more than one hundred and fifty hijackings in the United States.

Reporter Brendan I. Koerner has pieced together a mosaic of the most typical and bizarre cases. However, he does not stop at masterful descriptions of the various motivations of hijackers and their fluctuating success rates. He also tracks how fundamentally air travel has changed. Boarding a plane today automatically means a series of security checks, strict rules for carry-on luggage, and lengthy waits. None of this was common in the sixties. Especially on American soil, where distances are vast, it was a quick – albeit expensive – means of transportation, where one could buy a ticket at the last minute and rush to the airport half an hour before departure. Airlines did not want to endanger their customers or crew and complied with hijackers in everything – from the amount of ransom to transportation to the chosen destination. Even here...