Why ‘skyjackings’ are relatively rare
PARIS— The first airplane hijackings occurred not long after international air travel became commonplace. But, at the time, most hijackers tended to be driven by personal — and sometimes criminal — motivations rather than by politics.
In 1953, for example, Mira Slovak, a commercial airline pilot, fled Communist Czechoslovakia by diverting the DC-3 he was flying with 25 passengers on board to Frankfurt, Germany, and requested political asylum. His daring escape was emulated by dozens of others during the 1960s and early 1970s, including many who commandeered flights from the United States to Cuba.
Jetliners also became attractive targets for escaped criminals, who sought to use the planes and their passengers as leverage in ransom negotiations.
Perhaps the most famous such case involved a man who became known as D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 boarded a plane in Portland, Ore., armed with a bomb. After forcing it to land in Seattle, the hijacker released the passengers in exchange for a $200,000 ransom and a parachute — and then ordered the crew to take off again. Once in the air, the man leapt from the plane with his bag of cash, and was never seen again.
By the mid-1970s, at least150 planes had been “skyjacked” in the United States alone. Meanwhile, radical groups in the Middle East had also turned to using hijackings as a way to draw attention to their cause. In1968, hijackers seized an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land in Algiers. They held 22 hostages. After more than a month, the final 12 were released and only after a boycott by international pilots.
In 1970, another group of Palestinian militants hijacked five planes — four bound for New York, one for London — to demand the release of Palestinian activists imprisoned by Israel. Three of the planes were forced to land at Dawson’s Field, a British air force base in Jordan, while a fourth was diverted to Egypt. The crew of the fifth plane — an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York — succeeded in overcoming the hijackers, and made an emergency landing in London.
“That was the first major terrorist hijacking attempt that captured the media’s attention,” said Norman Shanks, a consultant and former manager of airport security at Heathrow Airport in London. “They were not intent on killing people. It was simply a way to get publicity.”
It was not until Dawson’s Field, Shanks said, that the international aviation community was moved to take co-ordinated action to prevent hijackings. But only in the late 1970s did the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, begin requiring passen- gers to pass through metal detectors and that hand luggage be X-rayed before boarding.
But while the new measures significantly reduced the incidence of hijackings, they did not eliminate the risk. Moreover, in many countries the enhanced screening procedures were only applied to international flights, leaving domestic flights vulnerable to potential attack.
That weakness was exploited to dramatic effect on Sept. 11, 2001, when four domestic U.S. flights were commandeered by members of Al Qaeda wielding box-cutters — items that were not prohibited on flights in the United States at the time.
Hijacking has become a higher-risk proposition over the past 15 years, said Philip Baum, managing director of Green Light, an aviation security consulting firm in London and author of a recently published history of aircraft hijackings and bombings.
“There has definitely been a change of mindset,” he said. “Since Sept. 11, they now can expect that the response from aircrew and passengers might be far more aggressive.”