How universal screening ended the golden age of hijacking (interview)

Speaking to Vox in March 2016 after the EgyptAir Flight 181 diversion, Brendan Koerner — contributing editor at Wired and author of The Skies Belong to Us (2013) — described what he calls the "golden age of hijacking": between May 1961 and the end of 1972 there were 159 hijackings in American airspace, most between 1968 and 1972, sometimes one a week or several in a single day. There was virtually no airport security; walking through metal detectors with searched carry-ons only began in 1973.

Koerner breaks the epidemic into three eras of escalating demands: until about 1969, hijackers wanted to go to Cuba, which some idealized as a socialist paradise; then, after a Marine named Raffaele Minichiello got an airline to fly him from Los Angeles to Rome, hijackers realized they could demand any destination; from 1970 came extortion, with demands for hundreds of thousands of dollars or gold bars.

Through it all, Koerner says, airline policy was to comply totally — keep the plane safe, the passengers safe, and get the money back later — because airlines feared customers would find metal detectors more off-putting than the possibility of a midair diversion. One proposed fix he calls outlandish: building a fake Havana airport in South Florida so hijacked planes could land there instead.

What changed, Koerner recalls, was a November 1972 Southern Airlines Flight 49 hijacking in which three men threatened to crash the plane into the atomic reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Soon after, starting January 5, 1973, the FAA instituted universal physical screening of passengers — everyone passed through metal detectors and had bags searched, initially by hand. Newspapers sent reporters expecting confrontations on the first day; instead the public, exhausted by the epidemic, welcomed it despite significant delays.

A decade of total compliance had made hijacking a working service; screening every passenger at boarding removed the payoff in one chokepoint move

Total compliance worked exactly well enough to advertise itself: every successful demand taught the next hijacker the service was reliable.

Airlines priced security lines as the bigger commercial risk, so the industry resisted screening for over a decade.

Demands escalated — asylum, then anywhere, then ransom — raising the cost of compliance each era.

The reactor threat of November 1972 made the tail risk undeniable and broke the stalemate that had protected the old policy.

When a threat exploits a single chokepoint, regulate the chokepoint rather than the incidents: appeasing each attacker one by one kept the epidemic alive for eleven years.

Universal screening began January 5, 1973 and, as the interview's framing notes, the golden age of hijacking ended; screening became a permanent fixture of flying. Koerner notes that when an EgyptAir flight was diverted to Cyprus in March 2016 and ended with the hijacker arrested and passengers released unharmed, the drama read as retro — a throwback to an era when hijackings ended in inconvenience rather than mass tragedy.