The strangest stories from the golden age of plane hijacking
In the last decade, 20 aircraft around the world have been hijacked. That figure still seems worryingly high in a post-9/11 world - how could an airline allow a stranger to wrestle control of a plane full of passengers? - but historically speaking the number is indicative of a comprehensive victory in the battle against crime in the skies.
Track back 50 years and hijackings were commonplace. In 1969 there were 86 in 12 months, according to statistics from the Aviation Safety Network; in 1970 there were 70.
In five years, between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 aircraft were hijacked in the US alone, sometimes two on the same day. The startling regularity of seizures at 36,000 feet has led to the era being dubbed “the Golden Age of Hijacking”.
So who was to blame? Broadly speaking, Cuba. So keen were some to share in the bounty of the Cuban Revolution of the Fifties that they were prepared to take over a plane and direct it south to the island some 90 miles of the Florida coast. “Take me to Cuba” soon entered satirical lexicon, with Monty Python among those to create a skit on the theme.
Coinciding with the advent of mass air travel, hijackings became common enough that airlines, and indeed passengers, greeted the act not with fear and concern but weariness and acceptance.
Time magazine in 1968 ran a piece titled “What to do when the hijacker comes”, revealing that in the past 11 months “more than 1,000 Americans have visited Cuba unexpectedly”. For travellers a planejacking meant a diversion to Havana and a lengthy delay, but not much else. For pilots, they had in their cockpit maps of the Caribbean and knew the routine off by heart.
Brendan I Koerner in his book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking dissects the phenomenon.
“Most skyjackers earnestly believed that upon reaching Havana, their sole destination during the mid-to-late Sixties, they would be greeted as revolutionary heroes,” he wrote. “Every skyjacker was an optimist at heart, supremely confident that his story would be the one to touch Castro’s heart.”
Before long the US government decided enough was enough and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was tasked with tackling the problem. Not least, because Fidel Castro was charging American airlines $7,500 a pop to retrieve their planes.
The FAA was initially unsure on what could be done. At a senate hearing in 1968, the FAA’s Irving Ripp said hijackings were an “impossible problem short of searching ever passenger”. “If you’ve got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana, and he has got a gun, that’s all he needs,” he said.
The aviation administrator then turned to the populace, inviting ideas from the general public on how to halt the upward trend. Suggestions ranged from the sensible to the downright ridiculous: have all passengers wear boxing gloves so they cannot hold guns; install trapdoors outside the cockpit; play the Cuban national anthem before take off and arrest anyone who knows the words.
One standout piece of blue sky thinking, Koerner notes, was building a replica of Havana airport on the southern tip of Florida so that pilots could trick the hijacker into thinking they’ve landed in Cuba when really they were still on American soil. Another was the idea of free one-way flights to Cuba for anyone keen enough never to return to the US; Castro was not game and dismissed the ideas as “good riddance flights”.
Eventually, in 1973, the FAA created its first hijacker profile before introducing passenger screening, metal detectors and bag searches; the birth of airport security.
But not before the hijackings continued. “Starting in ‘69, you had hijackers demanding to go to other places,” Koerner explained to Vox.
“The first was Raffaele Minichiello, a Marine who demanded to be flown from Los Angeles to Rome. And the airline complied with his request. So you had hijackers saying, wait a minute, we don't have to just go to Cuba. We can go anywhere! You have people demanding to be taken to Algeria and North Korea and Sweden and Argentina, and other different locations on the map.”
All the while airlines were compliant, which may have helped spur on the Seventies extortion hijackings. “Through the end of '71 and '72, hijackers were demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars, or sometimes gold bars — lots of material wealth in exchange for the passengers,” said Koerner.
One such man was DB Cooper - one of history’s most mysterious characters. In short, Cooper (which may or may not be his real name) in 1971 hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight, demanded and was given $200,000, before parachuting out the back of the Boeing 727; he was never found and the FBI only recently gave up on the case.
As the Golden Age drew to an end, hijacking continued around the world, some politically motivated, some purely criminal, but with increasingly brazen demands and a preparation to use more and more lethal force. In between 1968 and 1971, despite scores of hijackings, there were only 21 related deaths. This number rose in the subsequent years, with 114 reported in 1977.
The growing death toll led authorities to take the threat more seriously; snipers were placed at airport tarmacs and plain-clothed officers boarded aircraft. Koerner says that the hijacking of a Southern Airlines flight in 1972 by three men who threatened to fly it into the atomic reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee helped wake the US government to the potential catastrophic consequences of the fad.
Security was still nothing compared to today - much introduced in the wake of September 11 - and hijackings continued. The Aviation Safety Network recorded dozens of seizures through the Seventies and Eighties - in 1993 there were 36 hijackings; 27 in 2000. Through the Noughties, as airport and aircraft security tightened exponentially (prior to 2001, for example, it was not uncommon for cockpit doors to be open or unlocked during flight), the number of instances plummeted. There were, however, in the 2000s, incidents involving Cuba, only this time hijackers taking control of planes on the island and demanding to be flown to the US.
Hijackings today are now incredibly rare and make for major news: consider the coverage of EgyptAir Flight 181 in 2016, which was commandeered by an Egyptian man who was labelled not a terrorist but “an idiot”. In 2015 there was not a single hijacking around the world, for the first time since 1964. The feat was repeated in 2017.
From the comfort of a hijack-free airline industry it is easy to look back at the Golden Age of Hijacking as a peculiar, amusing blip in air travel, but it is also clear that the lessons learnt then have the made the sky the much safer place it is today.
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