Why is it that airlines had a bunch of hijackings and crashes in the 70's?

Question

I was looking at wikipedia at a bunch of different airlines...PanAm and TWA seemed to have a bunch of crashes and hijackings...American also seemed to also...most of this was predominate in the 1970s and 1990s...why is that? i mean by the 70s planes werent a new thing and were no longer just for the rich...so why was the rate bigger then compared to now and other decades?

Answer 1

Terrorists

Answer 2

1. Hijackings were new in the 1960s and the destination was often Cuba. In the 1970s this changed to more commonly being the work of Arab terrorists.

2. Crashes only seemed to be at a higher rate in the 1970s than in earlier decades because the volume of air traffic exploded in that decade. Passenger jets were introduced in 1958, making air travel faster and more convenient. New airlines and new routes sprang up, airports were constructed and enlarged, and larger and faster planes introduced throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Along with such growth comes, unfortunately, a larger number of accidents and mechanical failures.

Answer 3

Hijackings were a gift of the 'left'. These were meant to express a hatred for the west, whom they blamed for all ills on this earth. Hijackings signfied  demands (whether legal or illegal), expressions of hostility, bargaining factors, terror tactics and a host of other such inhuman and cruel figments of imagination of the human mind. It provided the perpetrators with vast publicity, misinterpreted as stardom. These heinous acts  were fuelled by hidden hands who used as tools, illiterate and needy people, for whom reasoning, logic and justice did not exist. It always signified East-vs-West. The Soviet/US crisis, crude oil price increases (which put windfalls at their disposal), Lebanon's civil war and the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) etc., can all be blamed for the spate of hijackings during the 70s. Thus, we can say, at that time terrorism was born, and exported in the form of hijackings.

Leila Khalid (PLO) gamorised this art and the criminals took it up from there. Symbolically, only two countries were targetted, US and Israel, but the suffering, agony and torture was borne by people from all over the world. Quite logically, the American and the Israeli carriers bore the brunt of most hijackings. These criminals had a field day till the time the aviation industry moved in to make air travel safer. Air marshals, stricter checks, baggage screening and other measures started showing results and things quitened down to some extent.

Bombing of airliners is another parallell episode and an insane by-product of hijackings. But, unfortunately, bombing has not remained restricted to airliners only. It has crept into luxury liners, trains, holiday resorts, places of worship, schools and just about everywhere else. Due to inernational co-operation, however, it has been greatly contained.

PS: Hijacking has culminated into present day terrorism, which, sadly continues to be seen rearing its ugly head all over the world.

Answer 4

Well first of all there were so many hijackings because it was very easy to hijack a plane there was little if no security also the 70's were very unstable times, the cold war was almost to an end and in the 90's people were in shock when the soviet union fell and cuba lost all support from them. there were so many crashes because the aircraft industry exploded and ATC (air traffic control) wasn't very good back then.

Answer 5

It was the terrorists that we should have delt with a long time ago, but because of the Viet Nam war and the anti war people we did nothing to stop them from hijacking planes from all over the world. They got the idea from Cubans who wanted to escape communism. Cubans would hijack planes to get to freedom. There was less security in the airports back then than at the local mall where you live now. I often think if we had went after the very few of the terrorists back then, we wouldn't be in these wars with them today. President Jimmy Carter did nothing about them and even liked them.

Answer 6

I think I can just say that in the introduction of Human Factor Course it is cited that in the 70's or earlier or later crashes were mostly attributed to aircraft failures or in itself technology being still not so high-tech.

Now when technology is at its best, state of the art design, and high tech crashes if there are may be attributed to mostly human error.

As for the hijacking then, i agree with the others that security at the airport then is quite lax.