Bringing Skyjackers Down to Earth

Strong, masculine, idealistic and politically radical. Those are the characteristics usually attributed to a familiar figure of the air age: the skyjacker. But that image is unrealistic, according to Dallas Psychiatrist David G. Hubbard. Actually, he says, the typical skyjacker is unsuccessful, effeminate, generally apolitical, and physically as well as emotionally immature.

In the current American Medical Association newsletter Update, Hubbard describes his interviews with more than 40 aerial hijackers who had been caught. Hubbard found his subjects sexually passive: "I've yet to meet a skyjacker who ever seduced a woman." Although hijackers are often folk heroes of the New Left, they are, if anything, right-wingers, and those who want to go to Cuba may aim "to assassinate Castro, not to join him."

Driving Death Wish. Hubbard believes that the typical skyjacker has two intense wishes: to fly and to flee. Sometimes he takes flying lessons in an unsuccessful effort to become a pilot. Sometimes he is "a wild parachutist." In any case, he has "a singular neurotic preoccupation with space, motion and the force of gravity," and "even dreams of being able to fly, weightlessly, like an angel or an astronaut." With his "driving death wish," he may hope to die by another's hand, fantasying that he will "rise upward to God in an antigravitational fashion."

It is from his parents that many a skyjacker wants to flee. Often as a child he alternately detested both his father, who may have been alcoholic and violent, and his mother, in many cases a religious fanatic. Characteristically, he sought sanctuary first with one and then with another, and since they disliked each other, each parent welcomed his desertion of the other. To Hubbard, the act of skyjacking symbolizes and repeats this childhood flight; skyjackers "seek to go to nations that are unfriendly to their homeland, in the expectation that they will not be returned."

One way to thwart that expectation and thus help prevent air piracy, Hubbard believes, is international agreement to send hijackers home at once. His view is supported by the fact that every pirate he interviewed said he would never have committed his crime if he had known he would be returned home at once. He also advocates eliminating the death penalty to make skyjacking useless as an unconscious method of suicide. And he believes that public stress on the sexual inadequacy of skyjackers would make the crime seem humiliating to men who might otherwise find it attractive.

Sexual Adventure. Hubbard suggests that attention should also be paid to the psychology of the skyjacked passenger, who is usually passive. Part of the reason is sensible fear of resisting a gunman. At the same time, the victim may rather like being hijacked. Passengers may sympathize with the skyjacker because "we are all earthbound and resentful of that fact." On the basis of interviews with skyjacking victims, Hubbard believes that they often enjoy seeing the criminal dethrone the pilot from power. They may be curious about Cuba, if that is their new destination, and even hope for sexual adventure there. Besides, they look forward to becoming celebrities.

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