Cockpit Confidential: The New Book is Here

To keep this post from being a full, one-hundred percent self-serving, I'll start by recommending somebody else's new book before moving on to my own....

In 1972, Western Airlines flight 701 was commandeered by a pair of young lovers as it prepared to land in Seattle. The skyjackers were Willie Roger Holder, a decorated Vietnam veteran turned amateur astrologer whose life had fallen down the tubes, and Catherine Kerkow, a former high-school athlete turned small-time drug dealer and erotic masseuse. Holder and Kerkow abscond to Algeria with a half-million dollar ransom -- and that's just the beginning.

Their story, a thrill-ride from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the streets of Europe and North Africa, is the subject of Brendan Koerner's The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (Crown).

But really, Brendan Koerner tells us two important stories -- not merely the extraordinary odyssey of a pair of hijackers, but the equally remarkable story of one of the most peculiar and intense periods of 20th-Century America.

In "The Golden Age of Hijacking," as the author dubs it, air piracy was rampant across America and the world. Between 1968 and 1972, U.S. commercial aircraft were commandeered at a rate of nearly one per week. Hijackings were so routine that over a four-month span in 1968 there were three instances of multiple aircraft being hijacked on the same day. (The Western Airlines 727 that Holder and Kerkow commandeered to San Francisco, before continuing on to Algeria, was one of two purloined jets to land at SFO that same evening.)

Koerner's chronicle of these events is exhaustively researched and staggering to behold. And in many ways it's this historical catalog that provides the book's most fascinating and colorful parts. For instance the story of Rafaelle Minichiello, the 20 year-old Italian-American who earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam and would later hijack a TWA 707 from Los Angeles to Rome, where he was lionized by the Italian media (and legions of teenage girls) and remains a folk hero to this day. And while everybody has heard of D.B. Cooper, it turns out he was among several hijackers of the era to parachute out the back of a Boeing 727 with a bag of ransom (one of them was a Mormon Sunday School teacher and former Green Beret). From hapless teenagers to misguided militants, the list goes on and on -- the list of hijackings is seemingly endless, the perpetrators endlessly eccentric.

Koerner also documents how, even in the throes of a hijacking epidemic, the airline industry staunchly resisted the sorts of intrusive security measures now taken for granted. While nobody is advocating that we return to an era in which passengers could freely stroll aboard with loaded handguns, we could probably use a bit of that spirit nowadays, caught as we are in a self-defeating mindset that seems willing to justify almost anything in the name of safety, no matter how irrational or intrusive.

If you're familiar with my work, and my semi-regular rants about airport security, it should come as no surprise that the security backstory is, for me, one of the most poignant aspects of Koerner's book. What I like best about is the sense of perspective it imparts, reminding us that the crimes against civil aviation was a target for criminals and saboteurs long before September 11th, 2001.

Which isn't to take away from Koerner's central narrative. His prose isn't always the most artful, but it hardly needs to be, because the saga of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow is so over-the-top that you can hardly put the book down. Their hijack plot was as audacious as it was ridiculous, and the ensuing drama was so -- to borrow a word of the period -- far out, that it can hardly be believed. Why a movie is yet to be made of their absurd adventure is hard to figure; on the other hand, most viewers would refuse to accept that it actually happened the way it did.

In "The Skies Belong to Us," Brendan Koerner rediscovers an unforgettable true-crime drama that resonates profoundly even today.

Koerner's sub-title,"The Golden Age of Hijacking," made me smile when I first saw it. I've been using the phrase, "The Golden Age of Air Crimes," in a similar context, in my articles and columns since at least 2003. In fact, it appears as the sub-title to a section in chapter six of my own new book, introducing a list of hijackings and bombings in the years prior to September 11th.

That book would be Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel. Questions, Answers, and Reflections, published last month by Sourcebooks.

Pitching one's own book is a little awkward, but I like to think of Cockpit Confidential as a wry, thoughtful, at times provocative look into the confounding world of commercial air travel: the ideal take-along for frequent flyers, nervous passengers, world travelers, and anybody yearning for a behind-the-scenes look at the strange and misunderstood business of commercial aviation.

More than just a book about flying, its subject is everything and everything about the grand theater of air travel (as I like to call it), from airport architecture to terrorism to the colors and cultures of the world's airlines. The seven chapter format blends questions and answers with informational essays and memoir. A partial rundown of topics includes:

-- How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them
-- Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety
-- The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport
-- Terrorism in perspective and a candid look at security
--  Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service
-- The colors and cultures of the airlines we love to hate
-- The yin and yang of global travel
-- Gratuitous references to 80s-era indie rock bands

Cockpit Confidential is everything my first book, Ask the Pilot (2004), should have been, but was not. It retains the same outline and chapter sequence, but virtually all of the content has been updated and revised in some way. Close to 70 percent of the material is all-new, including new essays, sidebars, a glossary, and substantially expanded questions-and-answers sections. 


Print and e-book versions are available at booksellers everywhere, including Amazon.com, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO, MEDIA REVIEWS, AND TO PLACE AN ORDER.

Autographed copies can be purchased through the merchandise page of my website.

[Above photo taken at Porter Square Books, Cambridge]

Now, as for the title.... I know, it's cheap and derivative -- a blatant poach of Anthony Bourdain's famous Kitchen Confidential. But it wasn't my idea.

Okay, fine, it was my idea. Or, more specifically, it was a collaborative decision between me, my agent and the publisher. It's a touch misleading, as the book isn't the least bit scandalous or sensational, but I like the sound of it -- the alliterative quality. As one person put it: "There isn't a better or a worse title for your book."

I can feel better knowing that I have Bourdain's blessings, sort of. He was a passenger on one of my flights a year or so ago, flying from Dublin to New York. I introduced myself and told him about the title. He laughed.

The big challenge in the meantime is getting the title some exposure at airports. As was the case with Ask the Pilot nine years ago, getting airport retailers to stock the book has been difficult. I long ago lost count of the number of people who, when I was working on the manuscript, said to me, “What a great idea; this will be for sale at every airport in the country.” As it happens, the book can be found only in only limited number of terminals. My gratitude to Hudson News and BookLink for carrying it, but other companies have been uncooperative. HMS Host, for example, which operates in over a hundred terminals worldwide under a variety of names ("Simply Books" is one of them), has shown no interest whatsoever.

If that strikes you as a poor business decision, I couldn't agree more, as would most reasonable people. This was a book written primarily for frequent flyers, and if there’s a more opportune selling point than the airport, for heck’s sake, I’d like to hear it. Talk about a captive audience. Is it just me, or could there not be a more ideal airport impulse buy?

I’ve gone into several outlets and spoke to the managers. In almost all of these stores, the on-site staff have virtually no control over which titles are stocked. It all comes from the corporate level, and getting your book onto their shortlist of approved titles is very difficult (unless your publisher is willing to spend lavishly on a promotion). That your book is for and about the airport makes no difference to them.

Meanwhile, you get your pick of the latest sports biographies, Suze Orman, and the usual assortment of thrillers. The other day at the airport in Detroit, I stopped by a store that was hawking the autobiography of Mike Piazza and, get ready now, the new "Mother-Daughter Love Story" by Carol Burnett.

I can't get Cockpit Confidential in the store, but there are plenty of big heavy hardcovers from a retired ballplayer and an 80 year-old comedian.

Airport retailing is weird across a number of fronts, not just books. To cut-and-paste from chapter three:

It appears the evolution of airport design will not be complete until the terminal and shopping mall become indistinguishable. I can understand the proliferation of Starbucks and souvenir kiosks, but it’s the saturation of high-end boutiques that confounds me. Apparently there isn’t a traveler alive who isn’t in dying need of a hundred-dollar Mont Blanc pen, a remote-control helicopter or a thousand-dollar massage chair.

And what’s with all the luggage stores? Who the hell buys a suitcase afterhe or she gets to the airport? I can't think of a more useless item to sell there, yet there isn't a terminal in the world without a Tumi outlet or a store selling roll-aboard bags.