During the 1950s several incidents pointed to a lack of proper security precautions in the nation's. airline industry. In 1950 thirty-one-year-old John Henry Grant took his wife and two children to Los Angeles Municipal Airport to load them onto a passenger plane for San Diego. He also included in their baggage a homemade time bomb, set to explode while the plane was in flight. At the airport Grant bought twenty-five thousand dollars worth of insurance on his family. Grant was foiled, however, when the rigged suitcase burst into flames while being loaded. He confessed that he was seeing another woman on the side and paying child support to a third. Blowing up his family seemed like the best way to uncomplicate his life.

The passengers on a DC-6B plane leaving Stapleton Airport in Denver on 1 November 1955 were not as fortunate. On that date John...