"The man walked across the tarmac toward the Boeing 727 carrying a briefcase containing the $30 wig, a pair of rubber gloves, a smoke grenade, and two guns-a Spitfire machine gun with the stock and front grip removed and eleven inches cut off the barrel,making it compact enough to fit in the briefcase, and a small-caliber pistol. It was Friday, June 23, 1972, just after 2 p.m. and about 80 degrees, but not particularly humid for St. Louis, with a light breeze. He had paid $70 for the roundtrip ticket toTulsa and back, under the name "Robert Wilson." As was almost always the case in the era before metal detectors and heightened security, he had walked through the terminal and directly to his gate without stopping. No one asked to see what he was carrying"--
He pulled off what some deem the crime of the century: skyjacking a commercial jetliner, collecting a ransom of $200,000, parachuting off the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 into the night, and simply disappearing. Since November 1971, "D.B. Cooper"—no one knows his real name or identity—has become a figure of enduring fascination and obsession. The FBI pursued him for over forty years, before closing the case and leaving it unsolved.Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. D.B. Cooper's exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation. What's less known is that it inspired imitators. None were more daring than the hijacker of American Airlines Flight 119. After commandeering the flight from St. Louis with a machine gun and collecting $502,500 in ransom, he parachuted out over Indiana. Unlike Cooper, he was tracked down.In The Hijacking of American Flight 119, John Wigger explores the wave of hijackings that swept over commercial flight between 1961 and 1972. One hijacker ran across the ramp in Reno, Nevada with a pillowcase over his head, gun in hand, to seize a United Airlines flight. Another collected a large ransom in Washington, D.C. before jumping over Honduras. Yet another rode a bicycle across the tarmac with a rifle strapped to the handlebars. Motivations involved an admixture of ideology, greed, derring-do, and a desperate need to be somebody. What they had in common was that their exploits transfixed the nation's attention, bringing about a transformation in airline security that remains with us still.With its focus on the parachute hijackers, Wigger's book gathers together the stories of this period of daring criminality and recounts them in gripping fashion, showing their effect on the public, the media, and law enforcement. Using never-before- published interviews and first-hand accounts, he brings to life one of the most chaotic and fascinating periods in American aviation history.
Beginning in 1968 a wave of airline hijackings swept across the skies over America. There were nearly 150 hijackings of U.S. commercial flight over the next five years. The most audacious of these air pirates were the parachute hijackers, starting with "D.B. Cooper" and ending with the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 119, the most daring of them all. John Wigger's gripping account of this period is based on fresh interviews and first-hand accounts from FBI agents, flight attendants, pilots, and passengers who were swept up in the heist and the hunt for the hijacker.
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