Bonnie and Clyde, the aerial version

Published 5:00 am Sunday, June 16, 2013

“The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking” by Brendan I. Koerner (Crown Publishers, 318 pgs., $26)

The writer Nick Tosches, reviewing a live album by Ronnie Milsap in 1976, called it “some of the best junk music you’re going to hear all year.”

It’s tempting to say something similar about Brendan I. Koerner’s new book, “The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking.”

Koerner’s book isn’t junk. But it’s such pure pop storytelling that reading it is like hearing the best song of summer squirt out of the radio. Both the author and his subjects are so audacious that they frequently made me laugh out loud.

In post-Sept. 11 America we are not accustomed to having much sympathy for those who would hijack airplanes — skyjackers, as the neologism has it. But Koerner’s book returns us to a more innocent time.

His book is about the 1960s and early ’70s, when it was possible to walk through an airport “without encountering a single inconvenience — no X-ray machines, no metal detectors, no uniformed security personnel with grabby hands and bitter dispositions.”

Once on board, you could smoke four cigarettes at the same time, if you felt like it. Some airlines allowed you to buy your tickets after takeoff.

A generation of criminals and bumblers and lost souls exploited this innocence. Koerner alights on the years from 1961 to 1972, when 159 commercial flights were hijacked in the United States, sometimes more than one a week.

Few of these skyjackers were what we would now recognize as terrorists. Among their ranks, Koerner says, were “frazzled veterans, chronic fabulists, compulsive gamblers, bankrupt businessmen, thwarted academics, career felons and even lovesick teens.”

Most didn’t intend to harm anyone. They wanted ransoms, and fresh starts in places like Cuba. More than anything they wanted a small slice of fame. “A lone skyjacker could instantly command an audience of millions,” Koerner observes. “There was no more spectacular way for the marginalized to feel the rush of power.”

Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired, and the author of a previous book, “Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II” (2008).

He folds many sad, weird and riveting skyjacking stories into “The Skies Belong to Us,” most of them little known, some more so, like the case of D.B. Cooper, who vanished out of a Boeing 727 in 1971 with more than $200,000.

The best move that Koerner makes in “The Skies Belong to Us” is wrapping all his information around one incredible single story, that of a veteran named Roger Holder and an imposingly beautiful would-be hippie named Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701, on its way from Los Angeles to Seattle, as a vague protest against the Vietnam War.

The couple became folk heroes of a sort, Bonnie and Clyde at 33,000 feet. Later they would mingle in Paris with movie stars and the social elite. The pair had claimed to have had a bomb, but they were not in fact carrying real weapons. No one aboard was hurt.

Koerner tells this story so well, with so many offbeat cliffhangers, that I am loath to give away much more than I already have.

“The skyjacking surge was one of the biggest stories of 1972, right up there with President Nixon’s landmark trip to China,” the author writes. “Even the dullest skyjacking made for scintillating copy. And the truly sensational ones were like gifts from the journalism gods.”

Upon Koerner, those gods have smiled.

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