Individual and group responses to confinement in a skyjacked plane.

The author was among 149 passengers and nine crewmembers skyjacked to the Desert of Jordan and confined to the plane for almost a week. This paper describes the shifting crises and anxieties to which the hostages were subjected, focusing on the gradual development of passenger self-organization and the factors tending towards group cohesiveness and group divisiveness during captivity and release.