14751. (David G. Hubbard) The Skyjacker, His Flights of Fancy

In the late 1960’s, there was a wave of “sky­jack­ings” — where lone gun­men would force air­planes to fly to Cuba. This book was a con­tem­po­rary psychiatrist’s attempt to ana­lyze the moti­va­tions of the Sky­jack­ers, based on inter­views with them in jail. In most cas­es, Cuba sim­ply extra­dited them to Cana­da, which then extra­dited them to the Unit­ed States. Even at the time, it was under­stood by every­one that the sky­jack­ings were not ini­ti­ated by, or encour­aged by the Cas­tro regime, which was actu­ally rather embar­rassed by the phe­nom­e­non. The author rejects the idea that there was any seri­ous polit­i­cal moti­va­tion behind the sky­jack­ings. In most cas­es, the polit­i­cal procla­ma­tions of the per­pe­tra­tors were far too shal­low and sil­ly to be tak­en seri­ously as motives. He goes through the per­sonal his­tory of each sky­jacker and finds that they are remark­ably uni­form. The typ­i­cal sky­jacker was the child of a vio­lent, bul­ly­ing father and a deeply reli­gious moth­er, who sub­se­quently failed mis­er­ably in carv­ing out any kind of suc­cess. They were usu­ally obses­sively reli­gious, and social­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cally extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Their sex­ual lives, most of the time, were pathet­ic. After some par­tic­u­larly dev­ast­ing fail­ure or betray­al, they quite spon­ta­neously con­cocted a scheme to cre­ate a dra­matic event that would some­how, they felt, resolve their dif­fi­cul­ties, at least in a sym­bolic sense. The idea of the sky­jack­ings seems to have occured to them sim­ply because oth­ers had done it, and it was a big thing in the news. The sim­i­lar­ity to the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files of ser­ial killers, dis­cussed in Elliott Leyton’s work, is strik­ing. Ley­ton would have had a more com­mon-sense approach to the case his­to­ries. Hub­bard used his data to con­coct a rather lame the­ory from the pseu­do-sci­ence of psy­chother­apy which was then still very influ­en­tial. But the case his­to­ries speak for them­selves, and it’s inter­est­ing for a read­er in 2006 to be remind­ed that air trav­el was not par­tic­u­larly safe forty years ago.

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