Skyjacked (Hijacked) by David Harper: A Young Soldier, a Captured Airliner and a Flight Over the Pole to Moscow
A young soldier called Weber threatens the crew of a commercial airliner and hijacks it. The captain treats him with special care and tries to show him that things are not as bad as they seem, and manages to get most of the passengers off the plane.
Author: David Harper
Title: Hijacked (1970), published in the UK as Skyjacked
Format: English paperback (Corgi, 1972), 224 pages
Scope: Aviation thriller; basis of the 1972 film Skyjacked
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0552090492 (ASIN 0552090492)
A Few Left on Board
Only a handful remain on board: a pregnant woman, the hijacker himself, a stewardess, Angela, a jazz musician and a politician too heavy to escape down the evacuation chutes. The soldier then decides to fly on, and the pilot agrees, trying to keep the FBI out of it. Television follows every development.
Over the Pole
The twenty-year-old hijacker accepts everything he is offered, food and music, and soon relaxes and falls asleep. Halfway through the flight he changes his mind and orders the pilot to head for Russia, and so begins a journey over the polar route. Angela grows fond of the young man. The jazz musician gives his word to do everything he can to calm things down. Captain O’Hara admits the boy has made a mistake, but, given his youth, believes he deserves a chance.
Landing in the Soviet Union
When they land in the Soviet Union they struggle to explain the emergency landing. The captain insists there is no hijacker, but the Soviet officers take no chances and search all the luggage. Afraid of being discovered, Weber makes a last attempt to defend himself, and his companions try to stop things getting worse. In the end the Soviets eliminate the danger, and the others cannot understand the tragic ending.
A Story of Its Time
The novel appeared in 1970, at the height of a wave of aircraft hijackings. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of planes were seized every year, many of them diverted to Cuba, and airport security as we know it today, with passenger screening and metal detectors, did not yet exist. The idea of a lone, disturbed young man taking over an airliner was not fantasy but a real fear, and that gives the book its edge.
The Film
The novel was filmed in 1972 as Skyjacked, directed by John Guillermin, with Charlton Heston as the captain, Yvette Mimieux as the stewardess Angela, James Brolin as the hijacker and Walter Pidgeon as the senator. It belongs to the wave of disaster and airborne-peril films of that decade, and it follows the book’s main lines, including the flight over the pole to the Soviet Union.
A Note on the Author
Little reliable information is available about David Harper, and the novel is now hard to find, so second-hand copies of the Corgi paperback are the easiest way to read it.
Hostages and Sympathy
One of the most interesting aspects of the story, as the reviewer points out, is the bond that develops between the young hijacker and the people he is holding. The term Stockholm syndrome was coined only a few years later, after a bank siege in Sweden in 1973, to describe exactly this kind of reaction. The novel shows it with surprising sensitivity: the passengers and crew see Weber not only as a threat but as a lost, frightened young man, which makes the ending all the more painful.
Why Read It
The events reflect the very different mentalities of two countries. The musician’s promise to protect the hijacker cannot prevent the terrible end, and, as the reviewer notes, everyone who has formed a bond with him seems to suffer from Stockholm syndrome, unable to see the danger they were in.
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