More than just an enthralling story about a spectacular crime and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath, The Skies Belong to Us is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail. Buy the eBook. The Skies Belong To Us is a paean and a warning and a true-life tale of two kids who knew better but didn't care. And it puts into perspective just how bad things got before airlines were forced.

On June 2, 1972, a few minutes before his flight from Los Angeles was scheduled to land in Seattle, a tall, skinny black man in an Army dress uniform walked up the aisle and handed the flight attendant an index card that said he was wired to bomb the plane. Like everything else about the man, his note seemed to veer between the meticulous and the insane.

He had drawn a diagram of the bomb he said he was carrying in his briefcase; it was so credible the pilots concluded he had had training in explosives. But his note seemed the product of a manic mind: “Success through Death,” it read, and it said that he had accomplices in the cabin from the violent radical Weatherman group, and the not-violent radical group Students for a Democratic Society. The pilots decided to comply. They asked the man where he wanted to go. North Vietnam, he said.

The man, whose name was Roger Holder, was not actually a member of the Weatherman, or of S.D.S. He was a traumatized, unemployed drifter, whose only accomplice was his 20-year-old girlfriend, Cathy Kerkow, who until a few days earlier had been working in a San Diego massage parlor. They were radicals only casually, with no obvious aptitude for terrorism: Holder consulted astrological charts to ease his mind during the hijacking, and when it turned out the plane lacked the capacity to fly across the Pacific, he chose a new destination — Algiers, where the charismatic Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver had taken up residence. This material, naturally a great yarn, is handled exceedingly well by the journalist Brendan I. Koerner, whose main interest, beyond the simple delight of the story, is in excavating the skyjacking epidemic from history — an extended moment, from 1968 to 1972, when dozens of planes in the United States were taken over by hijackers, most of them professing political aims.

These acts of violence had become so normal that air traffic controllers in Miami were given direct lines to Havana, where the planes were often being diverted. Koer­ner is particularly sharp in detailing the strange collision of forces that contributed to the epidemic — psychologists, a powerful airline lobby that resisted government efforts to install more effective preflight security, a Vietnam-weary nation a little less sure than usual whether it sided with authority or the radicals.

But “The Skies Belong to Us” has a more urgent theme, though Koerner is less explicit about it: the often circumstantial nature of political violence. We tend to assume that terrorists are those who have made the most profound philosophical commitment to their cause and undergone the most extreme radicalization, like the glamorous Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled or, currently, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In Holder and Kerkow’s story, the familiar late-’60s issues of the left are all there: racial alienation and separatism, the Vietnam debacle, feminism, even an allegiance to Angela Davis, the indicted black militant and Communist whose freedom Holder intended to bargain for with his hijacked plane. And yet Koerner’s deft touch, his deference to the randomness of his characters’ story, helps show that the commitments of Holder and Kerkow, and of many of the other radicals they met, were deeply felt but transitory, even momentary — depots that they ghosted through. Holder and Kerkow, young and broke and often happily stoned, were not obvious terrorists.

She was a couple of years out of a small-town Oregon high school, and had moved to San Diego, which to her was “a wonderland of sunny days and easy sex.” He was a withdrawn, spacey Vietnam vet who had received an undesirable discharge and took solace in building elaborate model airplanes. The grievances Holder nursed against his superior officers escalated in the spring of 1972, when he became obsessed with Davis’s conspiracy trial, which he perceived as a persecution. (It is thanks to Koerner’s capacities as an investigator that we know this great detail: what really outraged Holder was not the politics of the trial but the prosecution’s use of Davis’s personal letters, which he viewed as a violation of her privacy.). Having noticed the success of other skyjackings, Holder started drawing up plans to hijack a flight and demand that Davis be liberated and flown with him and Kerkow to Hanoi. (Holder and Kerkow’s shared fantasy was that they would then migrate to Australia and live a hippie, outback existence.) The couple seemed almost surprised when the airline complied with their request for half a million dollars in cash, when the pilots politely ferried them across the Atlantic, when the skyjacking actually worked.

EXCLUSIVE: What a great get. Has just acquired The Skies Belong To Us, an adapted screenplay from ( Master of Sex). The film project, based on the book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner, is about an Army veteran named Roger Holder and girlfriend Cathy Kerkow hijacking a Western Airlines Flight in a protest against the war in Vietnam. Through a series of events, they fled across an ocean with a ransom of $500K, which brought them infamy around the world.Ashford will produce with. Koerner, a longtime contributor to Wired magazine, will be tthe executive producer. Ashford and Timberman were also the executive producers on Masters of Sex, along with Timberman’s producing partner Carl Beverly. Timberman/Beverly also were the executive producers on Justified, and currently are the executive producers on Elementary and Seal Team through her Timberman/Beverly production company.

The game focuses on the consequences of a massive ecological catastrophe on Earth, the reasons are only vaguely known.unique history and realistic framework.The player himself chooses ideology to follow, should it be the partisan of science and technical progress or those who themselves part of nature consider, with the defenders of the forests.Survarium is a post-apocalyptic shooter set in Eastern Europe after an ecological disaster.

The story of The Skies Belong To Us centers around a kind of Bonnie & Clyde of the Skies. When Kerkow rebelled against her white conservative upbringing and fell in love with the African-American Holder, the two made a decision to start a new life together somewhere far away – and ended up carrying out the longest distance hijacking in American history.Ashford is the creator and executive producer of the Showtime drama Masters of Sex and she has written for the HBO miniseries John Adams and The Pacific. She recently adapted Undaunted Courage for HBO, which is the Stephen Ambrose account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is currently working on an adaptation of Operation Mincemeat, a non-fiction spy story set in WWII.Ashford, Koerner, and Timberman are repped by CAA.

Koerner is also repped by The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency.Subscribe to and keep your inbox happy.