When was the first hijacking of airplane

You have people demanding to be taken to Algeria and North Korea and Sweden and Argentina, and other different locations on the map. BK: In you had the extortion phase. Hijackers start asking for exorbitant amounts of ransom.

And again, the airlines comply with them. The airlines' policy was comply totally, and if you do that, that increases the odds that the plane will be safe, and the passengers will be safe, and we'll get the money back. 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.

What does it have in common with the hijackings you wrote about? Brendan Koerner: My phone started buzzing at in the morning with people in Europe familiar with my work. I was pretty fascinated by it. The rare thing in this is someone using a plane to get to a foreign land, which was pretty typical for what I call the "golden age of hijacking" but is not something you see very often these days. He was clearly interested in some kind of negotiation. He released the hostages, and there was a protracted period of time with the plane on the tarmac before they were released.

LN: What would happen today on an American plane if someone tried to hijack it the way they did the EgyptAir flight? BK: One thing you have to keep in mind, during this golden age, the policy of the airlines was total compliance. Clearly knowing what we know now, that there are people willing to kill themselves in the service of killing many others, that alters the equation. There's an assumption that negotiation isn't a possibility anymore, that it's something we aren't going to entertain because the risks are just too great.

It's really hard to see a situation in which something of this nature would happen. Things worked out fine in the end, everyone was safe, and I suspect that the air crew sized up this man, this hijacker, who seems like he was somewhat mentally unbalanced, sized him up and realized their best policy was to get the plane safely on the ground somewhere and deal with this.

So clearly we have to trust our great pilots to make snap judgments. But given our horrific experiences with hijacking as of late, it's very hard to imagine a return to this sense of "let's make everything a negotiation. LN: What made hijacking so common then, aside from the fact that we're talking about a generally tumultuous period — the late '60s — in American life?

BK: It was a time period in American history when you had frustration — with the fact that some of the idealism of the mid-'60s had not panned out, that the war in Vietnam was intensifying. Clearly there was a lot of frustration around the fact that the great promise of the civil rights movement had not panned out as people had hoped. There had been some assassinations. There was cynicism. And airplanes were great targets. First of all, because of the lack of security, but also because there was a fascination with commercial air travel at this time.

This was an era when anyone could afford a plane ticket. Air travel was much more glamorous and luxurious than we are accustomed to. Even on a short-haul flight, you would be served steak and champagne in coach class. There was real interest in the technology in the way there is not today. A company like Boeing was being revered as a technological pioneer in the way that Apple is today.

For people who wanted attention and wanted to make a stir and wanted to play out their personal narrative of rage and disillusionment, airplanes were a great venue in which to do that. Hijackings seemed to happen in clusters, spurred by the media attention lavished on hijackers; you write about hijackings as a way for people who felt isolated or angry or marginalized to feel powerful.

Even though the result is a lot less deadly, is it fair to compare this to the mass shooting epidemic? BK: I clearly was thinking about the mass shooting phenomenon when I was thinking about the book, about a behavioral criminal epidemic and how that plays out. There was research done at the time on this fact of how the hijacking "virus" transmits across these populations. When they interviewed hijackers who had been captured and psychiatrists who interviewed them in prison, they would say how they were inspired by news coverage of hijackings and thought, "I can do better than that; I can improve upon that.

LN: The airlines had a policy of trying to give the hijackers what they wanted. If they wanted to go to Cuba, they'd take them to Cuba. If they wanted money, they'd bring the ransom and try to arrest the hijackers and get it back later.

How did that come about? How did the government and the public react to this epidemic? BK: The airlines had a tremendous amount of political influence at that time.

There were a number of congressional hearings about this issue over those years. And time and again, the airlines managed to use the political clout to stall reform. As reported by the BBC, negotiations were carried out and resulted in all other hostages being released. The case resurfaced in when a Lebanese man was arrested in connection to the incident, but was later released because of a case of mistaken identity.

The hijacking — which took on a plane directed to Cairo from Athens — began ten minutes after take-off when three members of the Palestinian militant group Abu Nidal Organisation took control of the plane and started to divide Israeli and American passengers from the rest of the hostages.

On the plane, there was also an Egyptian security guard who shot one of the terrorists dead before being fired back at. The incident caused the cabin to lose pressure forcing the captain to perform an emergency landing in Malta, instead of flying off to Libya, as demanded by the criminals. Once arrived, negotiations began between the Maltese Government and the hijackers — who said they would kill one person every 15 minutes if the government did not allow the refuelling process.

Ali Rezaq, who became the hijacker in charge, killed five people — two Israeli and three Americans — as a result of his conditions not being met. The incident provoked the strong reaction of Western governments who after a series of diplomatic talks with Malta, managed to send a commando of US-trained Egyptian soldiers to rescue the hostages.

The Egyptian taskforce, though, directly attacked the plane by detonating an excessive amount of explosive. These hijackings became so numerous that the phrase "Take me to Havana" entered popular culture. The agreement came about through an exchange of diplomatic notes. It was in Cuba's interest to make the agreement because many Cubans had hijacked planes from Cuba and forced them to fly to the United States.

The agreement allows either country to take into account extenuating circumstances when the hijackers acted "for strictly political reasons and were in real and imminent danger of death without a viable alternative, provided there was no financial EXTORTION or physical injury" to crew, passengers, or other persons 12 I.

In addition to this agreement, the United States, in , made the hijacking of an airplane a federal crime. Under the Aircraft Piracy Act 18 U. Hijacking has not been confined to the United States and Cuba. In , hijackers seized more than 90 planes around the world. In these situations hijackers sought the satisfaction of political demands and a platform to air their views.

In , members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three airliners and flew two of them to an airstrip in the desert near Amman, Jordan, while blowing up the third in Cairo, Egypt after releasing the passengers and crew.