From a story on politico.com by Myah Ward headlined “A solution from the 1970s for the gun debate”:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were as many as dozens of plane hijackings a year, and no one was doing anything about it. Airport security didn’t exist. No one checked your bag. There were no metal detectors or ID checks. Sometimes you could even buy your ticket on the flight.

Brendan Koerner, the author of “The Skies Belong to Us,” calls the years between 1961 and 1972 the “golden age of hijackings.” They were accepted as a fact of life, something that came along with having airplanes.