Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Because of these and other systemwide measures, hijackings of major passenger airliners became increasingly rare in the United States—until September 1976, when Croatian separatists ordered Chicago-bound TWA Flight 355 out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport to land in Paris. After commandeering the plane, they announced that, as proof of their seriousness, they had stashed explosives in a subway locker under Grand Central Terminal. Although their claim of having smuggled weapons aboard Flight 355 turned out to be a bluff, the Manhattan bomb was real; on Saturday, September 11, a police officer named Brian Murray died while trying to deactivate the explosives. There were no other hijacking-related fatalities within the United States for another twenty-five years. To the day.