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Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

Hijackings were extremely common prior to flight security. TSA was another level, that was extremely frustrating throughout the 2000s, but at a minimum it prevents wildly unstable people from boarding with weapons

Check out this list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

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> at a minimum it prevents wildly unstable people from boarding with weapons

The TSA reliably fails penetration tests; they miss between 70% and 95% of them. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...

What's likely caused hijackings to fall off a cliff is a) reinforced cockpit doors and b) the knowledge of crew and passengers that the hijackers might be homicidal.

Pre-9/11, advice was to cooperate, get the plane on the ground, and negotiate/assault, with pretty good overall results for the passengers. That is... not the advice today.

Reinforced cockpit doors were not implemented on planes until around 2002. Meanwhile, hijackings fell dramatically after only basic fight security that was implemented nearly 20 years before that.

I don't think people realize just how common hijackings were in the early 1970s, with sometimes two hijackings on the same day. (Between 1968 and 1972 there were over 130 US hijackings.)

But after a hijacker threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor in 1972, the FAA introduced passenger screening and metal detectors. Before that, there was basically no security.

An interesting article: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...

There are more-plausible theories of why hijackings are now rare. One of the most plausible is that armored cockpit doors and the policy that they should never be opened during a hijacking has put hijackers out of business.

TSA security checkpoints are a gift to the business models for autonomous vehicles. If you can have your car do the driving for you, an overnight car trip will be a good alternative to flights under 500 miles ad possibly all short-haul flights in the US.

I wrote a rebuttal with sources but on second thought, I think you make a good point. I should look at the data more and revisit my stance.

Common-er, yes; “extremely” seems a bit excessive. It’s not like there was a hijack a day. And as others said, what stopped the trend is more likely to be the fact that passengers’ cooperation is now impossible.

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