Looking back on the golden age of skyjacking

Something triggered a memory for me of how when I was a child in the late 60s and early 70s there were a lot of popular culture jokes in the US about skyjackings, almost all of which — the jokes that is — revolved around the skyjacker demanding the plane be taken to Cuba.

This made me wonder how many such incidents there were. I had a vague sense that airport security was minimal at the time, although I didn’t actually fly on a plane between a couple of flights to Mexico as a toddler in the early 1960s that I don’t remember, and the mid-1970s.

The wonders of the internet being what they are, I hunted around a bit and discovered the following:

Skyjackings, both in the US and internationally, were very rare prior to the 1960s. Then over the course of the 1960s they started to become a regular thing in the US primarily. This clearly seems to have been some sort of copycat/social contagion phenomenon, as incidents and coverage of them begat more incidents, to the point where between 1968 and 1972 there was a skyjacking of a commercial flight in the US an average of once every 13 days!

There were 137 such incidents over those five years. 90 involved demands to take the plane to Cuba, 21 to other destinations, and 26 were extortion attempts of some sort. I haven’t found any information of how many of these attempts were successful — I’m pretty sure that nothing like 90 flights ended up in Cuba — and I gather that, at the time, this was considered more of a kind of relatively petty annoyance, more like losing your luggage, than the sort of terrorist incident that skyjackings would later become, both in reality and certainly in the popular imagination.

One reason there were so many was that my sense that airport security was minimal was if anything an overstatement: it was more like completely non-existent. There wasn’t even an FAA rule against carrying a concealed weapon on a flight until 1961, cockpit doors mostly didn’t exist and certainly weren’t locked prior to the mid-1960s, and — check this out — carry-on luggage received no screening of any kind whatsoever prior to an emergency executive order from Richard Nixon in December of 1972! In those days, you could just saunter onto a commercial jet with a Dirty Harry style 45 magnum in your carryon luggage and no one would be the wiser, just as had been the case in biblical times.

Speaking of which, TSA officials confiscated 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints last year, which is something like 19 per day. 94% were loaded. All of which is to say that America is land of contrasts and the election of Donald Trump will remain an eternal mystery.

Returning to our main topic, what most strikes me about all this was how the concept of skyjacking, which later became associated with various famous international terrorist incidents, was in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s regarded more like some sort of public nuisance, rather than a national emergency, despite, or possibly because of, its remarkable frequency.

In any event by the late 1970s new airport security measures produced a very sharp decline in these incidents, and by the 1990s skyjackings in the US were pretty much a distant memory. (The famous skyjacking terrorist incidents of the 1980s and 1990s were all overseas rather than in in the US). The 9/11 hijackers took advantage of a certain laxness around security measures that had developed in the intervening years, and of course since then airport and on-plane security has become much more stringent, although the fact that at least 19 Americans per day throw a loaded gun into their carry on bags — I assume some guns get through TSA, despite advanced detectors etc. — is a testament to the bizarre culture in which we live.

Speaking of which:

. . . it has been pointed out that this post failed to mention D.B. Cooper, let alone speculate on his fate, banknote serial numbers etc. Here’s a recent movie about that incident.