7 ms·

Security prevents routine hijackings. During the late 1960s there was one attempted hijacking every 5.6 days. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijackin

Security prevents routine hijackings. During the late 1960s there was one attempted hijacking every 5.6 days. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking

esskay 2y ago
Security does. But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. The whole shoe removal thing, belts, etc. It's the most pathetically over the top form of security, and totally unnecessary. It does not in any way shape or form provide any extra level of security that can't be covered by something much simpler, less invasive, slow or antiquated.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    Yeah, at the expense of my civil liberties. You do realize that you have to do a background check and an interview to get that, right? Whereas when I was a child you didn't have to do any of that to enjoy the right to keep your belt and your shoes on at the airport.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      >You do realize Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.
      - abecedarius 2y ago
        The U.S. used to take pride in freedom of movement. In fiction, demands for papers were a classic sign of a government gone over the line. Now you need ID even for a Greyhound or Amtrak. I guess you can still walk or ride a bicycle.
        ghaff 2y ago
        Funnily enough, a while back (may be different now) I somehow lost my license between the car and the terminal door and didn't have any backup because it was a last minute trip. Guessing it's not the case today post-RealID but I was still able to get through TSA. The kicker though was that I had to go through all sorts of machinations to check into the Travelodge near the airport and pay in cash. Ever since, I use a generally useless global entry ID as identification at the airport and keep my driver's license well secured.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        Yeah, similar experiences on both counts in early 2000s. The hotel's refusal to honor a reservation even with cash in advance was part of the new "not the country I grew up in" feeling, those years.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        It has more to do with having a credit card on file in case of damages. And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        Yes, it was. One thing there seems to be more of is bundling of politics, like "Y is bad" as rejoinder to "X is good" with no necessary link between them. I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.
    - mmh0000 2y ago
      I used to be in the same mindset as you. Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre). I rationalized it in a few ways: * "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...) * With modern corporate surveillance, corps already have a shit ton of "my data" that they will happily sell to anyone, including "The Government". (https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-und-datenhndler-der-massenberwachung-ausliefern#t=661 https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...) * If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
      - technothrasher 2y ago
        > "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.
      - quesera 2y ago
        The (US) government generally does not have fingerprints for the majority of people who have never been arrested.
        jacobgkau 2y ago
        That's fair since it's technically not the federal government, but when I moved from Missouri to Colorado in 2019, I had to provide fingerprints in order to get my Colorado driver's license. And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.
        aorloff 2y ago
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    So, you get to pay to bypass the theater? Seems like extortion then, since anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it. Why have a "security measure" only to allow bypassing it? The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval and the reasons for denial are of course obtuse.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - renata 2y ago
      You were 100% right until the random racism thing. I'm completely aware I'm paying a bribe for favorable government treatment. Paying the bribe is better individually though. I'd even agree if you said Global Entry is only $30 more because your fingerprints are part of the payment.
      - wizardforhire 2y ago
        Welcome to fascism. In Mussolini’s words “government you can do business with” great if you have money sucks for everyone else.
    - xp84 2y ago
      > anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it. Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design). > The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient. The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive. And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."
  - digitallis42 2y ago
    If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.
    - xp84 2y ago
      So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, and the program is useful in that adding a fast lane speeds up the lines for everyone, as the fast lane inherently has more capacity per hour. And it also means fewer people to be screened by the primary lanes, which means more attention can be put toward a group statistically more likely to contain a bad actor (because they have had no background checks). The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.
      - jacobgkau 2y ago
        > So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all). The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.
      - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
        We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.
- leoedin 2y ago
  You can always tell Americans at security in a European airport because they take their shoes off. European airports don't bother with shoe removal. Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - shakow 2y ago
    > European airports don't bother with shoe removal. They do, just kind of “at random”. I had it sometimes a bit of everywhere in Europe.
    - 4ndrewl 2y ago
      Same. Sometimes I've been asked by someone walking the queue to remove my boots. Never do, never a problem. I'm sure they just walk the queue so it feels like "something" is happening and you're not just waiting in yet another interminable queue.
      - dijit 2y ago
        if there are nails in the boots it triggers the metal detector. My boots aren’t glued (like timberlands and doc martins might be) and they trigger the detectors.
        extraduder_ire 2y ago
        Almost all of my shoes nowadays have steel toes in them. I think my count for being told to not take them off because they expect them not to exceeds being asked to take them off. Never flown out of a non-EU country.
  - RajT88 2y ago
    I accidentally had a small multi tool in my bag at Frankfurt once. The security agents took it out, unfolded the knife blade, discussed it a bit in German and handed it back to me. "It's OK! It's just a little guy! Go ahead".
- technothrasher 2y ago
  > But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    If you measure the position of the plane very accurately that will cause the momentum to become unknown due to quantum mechanics, which could make it hard to control the thing I guess. Hmm. At least you weren’t threatening to measure the momentum very accurately. Since that would make the position unknown. Would that turn the plane into a slab?
_bin_ 2y ago
things i have had confiscated: the blades for my twin-blade razor, pocketknives, leathermans, bottles of water, supplements, liquids that are slightly over 3.4oz. this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk. "police state reduces crime" okay i do not care. even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone. p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Things I’ve discovered in my carry-on (accidentally): a bottle of wine, box cutter, a weed pen, another weed pen, a large Anker battery, more wine, a chef’s knife.
  - rsingel 2y ago
    TSA aren't cops. They have no authority to take a weed pen or detain you for having one. They can call cops but they can only confiscate items deemed to be threats to a plane and only detain you for the same.
    - babyshake 2y ago
      I had the experience once of TSA finding numerous "things" in my luggage, looking at them and clearly knowing what they were, giving me a "you shouldn't have done that" look, putting them back, and letting me go.
- warbaker 2y ago
  Terrorist hijackings were a major reason for sky marshals being put on planes. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine famously hijacked some planes and then blew them up on camera. This led directly to Nixon putting sky marshals on planes. The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings
toss1 2y ago
It is not only security, it is the lockable cockpit doors and entire set of changed assumptions. The airplane hijacking game was entirely ruined by Al-Qaeda on 9/11. Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating. Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip. Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0]. So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite. And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it. [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3161354.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3161354.stm
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  To put it in gaming terms, the hijacking meta changed. Before, you had relatively minimal consequences as a hijacker. Now if you try anything funny, EVERYONE is going to be your enemy. You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.
nostrademons 2y ago
From that link, there were 137 hijacking attempts in the U.S. between 1968-1972, and 90 of them had Cuba as the destination. Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba. Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes. People are terrible at judging risk.
- dralley 2y ago
  >Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes. >People are terrible at judging risk. And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
  - intelfx 2y ago
    > And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl Proves the GP's point exactly.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  > Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba. Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    > Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. Well that's kind of what you'd expect a country to do if you treat it like a pariah and embargo people from even visiting as tourists.
    - freeone3000 2y ago
      Many other countries are also non-extradition to the US, for various reasons including reciprocity and how the US treats its criminals. It’s definitely not unique to Cuba.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
But very very few had any casualties - which is why we didn’t collectively freak it about it and establish the TSA. Also the vast majority were outside the US.

esskay 2y ago

Security does. But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. The whole shoe removal thing, belts, etc. It's the most pathetically over the top form of security, and totally unnecessary. It does not in any way shape or form provide any extra level of security that can't be covered by something much simpler, less invasive, slow or antiquated.

ghaff 2y ago
I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Yeah, at the expense of my civil liberties. You do realize that you have to do a background check and an interview to get that, right? Whereas when I was a child you didn't have to do any of that to enjoy the right to keep your belt and your shoes on at the airport.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    >You do realize Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.
    - abecedarius 2y ago
      The U.S. used to take pride in freedom of movement. In fiction, demands for papers were a classic sign of a government gone over the line. Now you need ID even for a Greyhound or Amtrak. I guess you can still walk or ride a bicycle.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Funnily enough, a while back (may be different now) I somehow lost my license between the car and the terminal door and didn't have any backup because it was a last minute trip. Guessing it's not the case today post-RealID but I was still able to get through TSA. The kicker though was that I had to go through all sorts of machinations to check into the Travelodge near the airport and pay in cash. Ever since, I use a generally useless global entry ID as identification at the airport and keep my driver's license well secured.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        Yeah, similar experiences on both counts in early 2000s. The hotel's refusal to honor a reservation even with cash in advance was part of the new "not the country I grew up in" feeling, those years.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        It has more to do with having a credit card on file in case of damages. And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        Yes, it was. One thing there seems to be more of is bundling of politics, like "Y is bad" as rejoinder to "X is good" with no necessary link between them. I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.
  - mmh0000 2y ago
    I used to be in the same mindset as you. Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre). I rationalized it in a few ways: * "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...) * With modern corporate surveillance, corps already have a shit ton of "my data" that they will happily sell to anyone, including "The Government". (https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-und-datenhndler-der-massenberwachung-ausliefern#t=661 https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...) * If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
    - technothrasher 2y ago
      > "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.
    - quesera 2y ago
      The (US) government generally does not have fingerprints for the majority of people who have never been arrested.
      - jacobgkau 2y ago
        That's fair since it's technically not the federal government, but when I moved from Missouri to Colorado in 2019, I had to provide fingerprints in order to get my Colorado driver's license. And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.
        aorloff 2y ago
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  So, you get to pay to bypass the theater? Seems like extortion then, since anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it. Why have a "security measure" only to allow bypassing it? The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval and the reasons for denial are of course obtuse.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - renata 2y ago
    You were 100% right until the random racism thing. I'm completely aware I'm paying a bribe for favorable government treatment. Paying the bribe is better individually though. I'd even agree if you said Global Entry is only $30 more because your fingerprints are part of the payment.
    - wizardforhire 2y ago
      Welcome to fascism. In Mussolini’s words “government you can do business with” great if you have money sucks for everyone else.
  - xp84 2y ago
    > anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it. Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design). > The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient. The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive. And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."
- digitallis42 2y ago
  If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.
  - xp84 2y ago
    So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, and the program is useful in that adding a fast lane speeds up the lines for everyone, as the fast lane inherently has more capacity per hour. And it also means fewer people to be screened by the primary lanes, which means more attention can be put toward a group statistically more likely to contain a bad actor (because they have had no background checks). The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.
    - jacobgkau 2y ago
      > So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all). The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.
    - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.
leoedin 2y ago
You can always tell Americans at security in a European airport because they take their shoes off. European airports don't bother with shoe removal. Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- shakow 2y ago
  > European airports don't bother with shoe removal. They do, just kind of “at random”. I had it sometimes a bit of everywhere in Europe.
  - 4ndrewl 2y ago
    Same. Sometimes I've been asked by someone walking the queue to remove my boots. Never do, never a problem. I'm sure they just walk the queue so it feels like "something" is happening and you're not just waiting in yet another interminable queue.
    - dijit 2y ago
      if there are nails in the boots it triggers the metal detector. My boots aren’t glued (like timberlands and doc martins might be) and they trigger the detectors.
      - extraduder_ire 2y ago
        Almost all of my shoes nowadays have steel toes in them. I think my count for being told to not take them off because they expect them not to exceeds being asked to take them off. Never flown out of a non-EU country.
- RajT88 2y ago
  I accidentally had a small multi tool in my bag at Frankfurt once. The security agents took it out, unfolded the knife blade, discussed it a bit in German and handed it back to me. "It's OK! It's just a little guy! Go ahead".
technothrasher 2y ago
> But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  If you measure the position of the plane very accurately that will cause the momentum to become unknown due to quantum mechanics, which could make it hard to control the thing I guess. Hmm. At least you weren’t threatening to measure the momentum very accurately. Since that would make the position unknown. Would that turn the plane into a slab?

_bin_ 2y ago

things i have had confiscated: the blades for my twin-blade razor, pocketknives, leathermans, bottles of water, supplements, liquids that are slightly over 3.4oz. this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk. "police state reduces crime" okay i do not care. even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone. p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Things I’ve discovered in my carry-on (accidentally): a bottle of wine, box cutter, a weed pen, another weed pen, a large Anker battery, more wine, a chef’s knife.
- rsingel 2y ago
  TSA aren't cops. They have no authority to take a weed pen or detain you for having one. They can call cops but they can only confiscate items deemed to be threats to a plane and only detain you for the same.
  - babyshake 2y ago
    I had the experience once of TSA finding numerous "things" in my luggage, looking at them and clearly knowing what they were, giving me a "you shouldn't have done that" look, putting them back, and letting me go.
warbaker 2y ago
Terrorist hijackings were a major reason for sky marshals being put on planes. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine famously hijacked some planes and then blew them up on camera. This led directly to Nixon putting sky marshals on planes. The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings

toss1 2y ago

It is not only security, it is the lockable cockpit doors and entire set of changed assumptions. The airplane hijacking game was entirely ruined by Al-Qaeda on 9/11. Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating. Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip. Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0]. So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite. And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it. [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3161354.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3161354.stm

Ferret7446 2y ago
To put it in gaming terms, the hijacking meta changed. Before, you had relatively minimal consequences as a hijacker. Now if you try anything funny, EVERYONE is going to be your enemy. You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.

nostrademons 2y ago

From that link, there were 137 hijacking attempts in the U.S. between 1968-1972, and 90 of them had Cuba as the destination. Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba. Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes. People are terrible at judging risk.

dralley 2y ago
>Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes. >People are terrible at judging risk. And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
- intelfx 2y ago
  > And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl Proves the GP's point exactly.
freeone3000 2y ago
> Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba. Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  > Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. Well that's kind of what you'd expect a country to do if you treat it like a pariah and embargo people from even visiting as tourists.
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    Many other countries are also non-extradition to the US, for various reasons including reciprocity and how the US treats its criminals. It’s definitely not unique to Cuba.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

But very very few had any casualties - which is why we didn’t collectively freak it about it and establish the TSA. Also the vast majority were outside the US.