99% Invisible - 120- Skyjacking

Episode Date: June 24, 2014

The term “hijacking” goes back to prohibition days, when gangsters would rob moonshine trucks saying, “Hold your hands high, Jack!” However, in the early days of commercial air travel, the idea that someone would hijack a plane was scarcely even … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The term hijacking goes back to Probition days. When gangsters would stop trucks carrying moonshine, and they come up to the guy in the cab with their pistol and point in their face and say, hold your hands high, Jack, and they take all the liquor and drive off with the truck. But in the early days of commercial air travel, the thought that someone would hijack a plane was scarcely even considered.

When they created government oversight of aviation in 1958, the congressional law that did that did not make hijacking a crime. Because no one had foreseen that anyone in a country like America, where theoretically, if you wanted to go somewhere, you could just buy a ticket to go there. No one assumed that any American would ever do this. And Brendan Eicharner, author of The Skies Belong to Us, Love, Interror, and the Golden Age of hijacking says that the design of airport terminals reflected that.

It's hard to fathom now, but you could literally get out of a taxi at the curb and walk through the terminal, walk onto the tarmac to the top of the boarding stairs and sometimes onto the plane itself without a ticket, without showing anyone your identification, certainly without anyone searching your person or your luggage in any

way, shape, or form. So it was very much similar to getting on a train when that was by design by the airlines. Then starting in 1961, an epidemic of hijackings began. It really wasn't epidemic, and I mean that in saying that the virus, the behavioral virus mutated over time, were kind of the basic features of these hijackings changed. The first phase of skyjackers all wanted passage to Cuba. May 1st, 1961 was the first American hijacking perpetrated by Antulio Ramirez Ortiz.

He was kind of a somewhat mentally disturbed electrician in Miami who got on a Key Westbound flight and announced With a holding a knife to the pilot's throat that he had been hired to assassinate Castro Vidal Castro and wanted to go there to warn Castro about this In the second phase the sky-jackers broadened their horizons to more crew and passengers of the Forest Hikejack incident involving a U.S. air liner. In the second phase, the skyjackers broadened their horizons to more distant lands. My favorite example is a man named Rafael Minicielo, who was an Italian-American Marine who actually went from Los Angeles to Rome, where he was hell as a hero upon landing and actually ended up only doing 18 months in prison because the time refused to extradite him or actually charge him with hijacking.

And he actually ended up after that, signing a contract to start a spaghetti western film. Very good looking guy. Then Skyjacker's morphed into classic kidnappers, demanding ransom. The man who started this was a man named Arthur Gates Berkeley, an unemployed truck driver who had to dispute with the IRS and he actually hijacked a plane from Phoenix to Washington, DC where he demanded $100 million in cash to be given to him about the Supreme Court because he was in rage they hadn't taken his tax case. So that kind of set off this last phase of the epidemic where people started asking for tons of money and gold bars and crates of liquor and cigarettes and anything their heart

desired. 100,000 in cash, get away, car. And I want the letter M stricken from the English language. And all the while, hijacking was never considered that serious a threat by the airlines, or the passengers, really. It was more that serious a threat by the airlines. Or the passengers really. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else. The assumption on the part of passengers was that, well, we know the airlines will fly us down to Havana.

The hijack will be taken off the plane, we'll maybe have to spend a night in Havana, we'll be put up in a hotel, maybe buy some cigars and rum for our relatives. And go see the sex show with Frado and Johnny Ola. I see him, that's super name. We'll have a good story to tell at the next cocktail party back in the US. It was taken lightly, because the notion that this could really be something destructive

and turn into mass murder was not something that people's minds at that time. And because the skyjackings weren't especially violent and the passengers weren't yet demanding extra security, the airlines fought to keep things exactly as they were. The airlines were scared. They thought that if they treated all their customers, kind of like criminal suspects because they were merely flying, that people wouldn't fly anymore, that people would drive to their destinations instead.

So the airlines put up a lot of roadblocks whenever someone, especially in government, mentioned the concept of having physical screening of all passengers. They would shoot that down. Use all their lobbyist muscle to shoot that down. They really forced the FAA's hand to come up with the weakest, most tepid security improvements. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, is the U.S. Government body that is responsible for the safety and regulation of civil aviation. And this was all in the name of, well, we can put up with some hijackings and those cost us, however, 20, 30 grand per hijacking in terms of loss convenience and whatnot.

Or they could pay millions and millions on X-ray machines, screenings, and security personnel. For the airlines, the smart financial choice was clear. I'll put up with periodic hijackings, comply totally, and keep the customer experience on the ground the same. But clearly something had to be done. If the airlines were unwilling to consider mandatory screening and checkpoints inside the terminals, some less intrusive and somewhat zaneer solutions had to be considered.

So, in 1968, the FAA created a special anti-haggacking task force to come up with some solution that would be palatable to the airlines. And they actually opened it up for public comment. They invited the public to submit suggestions about how this could be done. The most common suggestion was complete capitulation. Quote, provide free transportation to Cuba for those persons leaving the United States. End quote. But another tactic that was seriously considered by the Federal Aviation Administration

was to build a phony Havana airport in South Florida. So the idea is that at this time all the skyjackers wanted to go to Havana, and so you'd kind of just fly them out over the water and then turn back and land at this fake airport and arrest them when they got off the plane was a big idea. It turned out to be too expensive, it cost prohibitive, so they couldn't do that solution. But there were also a lot of the light-full technical solutions whose patents are so much fun to read. There was a hijack rejection seat. There was also one patent for an injector seat, which would have a, quote, hybidermic injection apparatus arranged for driving the needle of a hybidermic syringe

through the seat cushion into the passenger to instantly sedate or kill the passenger. Oh humans, the more you act like Wiley Gaioti, the more I love you. There was a trap door that was patented that would go right outside the cockpit and lock the hijacker in kind of a plexiglass chamber so they could be brought to justice when the plane landed. The public proposed that pilots depressurized the aircraft or expelled sleeping gas throughout the cavern so that everyone falls asleep and the crew would go out with oxygen tanks and

disarmed the hijacker. One that I loved actually was giving all the passengers boxing gloves and making them wear boxing gloves the duration of the flight and the theory being that you can't hold a gun if you have boxing gloves on your hands. Of course, then there would be an epidemic of extremely ill-advised boxing matches at 30,000 feet. But the real thing the FAN had going with was this behavioral profile. Now, here's the one thing about the airline terminals. There was one place you had to halt generally, and that was at the ticket agent to get a boarding pass or to

purchase a ticket. There are many more tickets purchased on-site at that time. And that was at the ticket agent to get a boarding pass or to purchase a ticket. There are many more tickets purchased on-site at that time. So this was the one choke point in the terminal experience was the ticket counter. The FAA solution was to train the ticket agents in this 25 behavioral cues that might indicate someone is a potential skyjacker. These were things like not maintaining appropriate eye contact, not caring about your luggage,

wearing military surplus gear. And if you saw any of these traits, behavioral traits in a customer coming through to get a ticket or a boarding pass, you would very discreetly ask that they go to a room on the side and be searched. This was not a good solution. The real problem is that ticket agents are not security personnel. They're dealing with hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds

of often very harried customers per day. And so they're not the people to really identify, even if you assume that these behavioral Q-tip offs work. And it turned out to be a bad assumption because plenty of skydackers passed through without notice. It was meant to be a very low impact solution at the one choke point that already existed in airports and it was really a failure.

But the solution that we all know they eventually came up with, screening everybody and their luggage with X-ray machines and requiring ID, all the things that make the airport the horrible place it is wasn't seriously considered until one hijacking changed everything. This is a really forgotten, really pivotal moment in American security history. This is a November 1972 kind of the tail end of this year where there's just been really crazy hijackings went after the next people asking for huge amounts of money. Then you have these three fugitives from the law who hijack a southern airways flight 49. They actually asked to be taken to Detroit. They had a grievance with the Detroit police and they wanted $10 million.

And they said if they didn't get it, they were going to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in their Knoxville, Tennessee. At the heart of that laboratory is actually a uranium-235 reactor. All of a sudden, everyone realized that an airplane could be a weapon of mass destruction. In this case, threatening to turn eastern Tennessee into a nuclear wasteland. And that's really when the light goes on for the airlines and the government that the current situation is no longer tenable. Fortunately, they escaped cataclysm there.

What happens is the airline doesn't have $10 million, they have $2 million. The high-duckers landed in Chad Nuke, Tennessee to pick up the money. And the high-duckers by that time had actually drunk all the liquor on the planes were completely bombed, and they bring on a high 50 pounds of cash.

It's a lot of money, and they think it's $10 million, and so they actually didn't bother to count it. It would have taken them forever to count that much money anyway. No one ever takes that into consideration. The high-jackers eventually landed their plane in Havana, where Cuban authorities captured them. Crisis averted, but surely after that,

you have the executive order mandating Universal physical screen to start on January 5th, 1973 and the airlines put up no fight that time The airlines really wanted the government to provide airport security But the government refused and the airlines hired contractors to do airport screenings and run the metal detectors But the airlines desperately tried to avoid and theyings and run the metal detectors that the airlines desperately tried to avoid. And they put them in January 5th, 1973 and there's literally not a single hijacking in American airspace that year.

There were 159 skyjackers in the US from 1961 to 1972 and they really changed the nature of air travel. Even though most of this history is completely forgotten along with the image of the deranged, desperate lone hijacker in military surplus clothing. The public conception of the hijacker changed dramatically in the 80s and response to specifically the TWA hijacking in Lebanon in 1985.

And all of a sudden sudden you had hijacking associated with Islamic terrorism, a real kind of scary prospect, something that people didn't understand and was a real boogieman for people at that time. So I think once we kind of had that image, that famous image of the pilot of that plane on the tarmac in Beirut with his captor, with the gun du to his head, leading

out of the cockpit. We completely forgot about these kind of more quaint hijackers who wanted to go to Havana because they had a bad experience in Vietnam. And so I started thinking about more of this really scary crime and a crime of kind of an enemy we don't really understand or know very much about. And so that earlier era was forgotten, papered over, if you will, by this new image of who the hijacker was. And that image remains today, reinforced, of course, by the terror attacks on 9-11, 2001. A date which was preceded by an entire decade free of any commercial

airline skyjackings in US airspace. After 9-11, the airlines finally got what they lobbied for back when mandatory screenings were introduced in 1973. The government took over security of our nation's airports and created the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA now calls the shots. 99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery, Truppleman, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

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