This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The term hijacking goes back to prohibition days.

When gangsters would stop trucks carrying moonshine and they come up to the guy on the cab with

their pistol and point in their face and say hold your hands high Jack and they

take all the liquor and drive off with the truck.

But in the early days of commercial air travel, the thought that someone would hijack a plane was scarcely even considered.

When they created government oversight of aviation in 1958,

the congressional law that did that did not make hijacking a crime,

because no one had foreseen that anyone in a country like America

where theoretically if you wanted to go somewhere you could just buy a ticket to go

there no one assumed that any American would ever do this.

And Brendan I. Kerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us.

Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, says that the design of airport terminals reflected that.

It's hard to fathom now but you could literally you know get out of a taxi at the curb and

walk through the terminal walk onto the tarmac to the top of the boarding stairs,

and sometimes onto the plane itself without a ticket, without showing anyone your identification,

certainly without anyone searching your person or your luggage in any way, shape, or form.

So it was a very much similar to getting on a train, and that was by design, by the airlines.

Then, starting in 1961, an epidemic of hijackings began. It really was an epidemic, and I mean that in saying that the virus, the behavioral virus, mutated over time,

were kind of the basic features of these hijackings changed.

The first phase of skyjackers all wanted passage to Cuba.

May 1st, 1961 was the first American hijacking,

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