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By 1961 US newspapers had started to use the term “skyjack” as interchangeable with “hijack” (in reference to the unlawful seizure of an aeroplane), but as the Stockton Record (Calif.) noted, the word “hijack” colorfully persists
Skyjacking, the hijacking of aircraft as a tactic toward the attainment of a particular aim or objective of the perpetrator, descended on the world like a plague from the late 1960s onwards. In just three years from 1968 to 1971 there were nearly 200 aerial hijackings globally and the numbers grew exponentially over the decade (‘Hijacking’, Britannica, www.britannica.com). Many of these hijack attempts were politically motivated, often by terrorist groups–Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Japanese Red Army Faction, Republic of New Africa, Black Liberation Army, Kashmir separatists, Croatian nationalists, etc—but a steady minority involved “lone wolf” attacks on airlines. Where the perpetrators targeted commercial flights it was generally standard practice for exorbitant ransoms to be demanded for the passengers taken hostage by the armed hijackers. A pattern of skyjack attempts in the 1970s, confined primarily to the US, saw ongoing instances of terrorists seizing control of commercial aircraft and demanding the flights be re-routed to Cuba1⃞ (see Endnote).
When did the first hijack attempt on an aeroplane take place? ☄︎ ☄︎ ☄︎ ☄︎ The earliest instance occurred in 1919, when aviation was still very much in its infancy. The ur-hijacker was one Baron Franz von Felső-Szilvás, a Hungarian aristocrat (and self-taught pioneering palaeontologist) who was desperate to escape the nascent Hungarian Soviet Republic. Trapped in Budapest, bereft of a passport, the baron commandeered a light plane at gunpoint and forced the pilot to fly him to Vienna where he sought refuge from the short-lived communist Magyar regime2⃞ .
It was not until 1931 however that the first recorded attempted hijacking of a commercial civilian airliner took place. It happened in Peru whilst the country was in the grip of revolutionary upheaval. American pilot Byron Rickard on his mail run flight for Pan-Am found his plane surrounded by Peruvian guerrillas upon landing in Arequipa. The guerrillas took Rickard prisoner and demanded the plane be flown to Lima to drop anti-presidential propaganda leaflets. Rickard refused to comply and the armed rebels were thwarted in their attempt at air piracy3⃞ .
“D.B. Cooper” – a shift in the methodology of “lone wolf” skyjacking 1971 brought by far the most outrageous hijack attempt by an individual. A passenger (known only by the alias “D.B. Cooper”) on an Oregon intra-state flight from Portland to Seattle informed cabin staff that he was carrying a bomb in his briefcase and demanded a sum of $200,000 and four parachutes upon arrival in Seattle. When his demands were met “Cooper” allowed the passengers to exit the 727 jet, and then he instructed the pilot to fly him to Mexico. At some point in the flight thereafter “Cooper” absconded with the loot…presumably he bailed out although no one knows where he ended up, disappearing without trace, with all FBI efforts to find him ultimately fruitless. The audacious feat won the solo hijacker a kind of instant folk-hero cache in the US, and more significantly prompted a spate of copycat, would-be skyjackers who tried to replicate Cooper’s success but failed (‘A Brief History of Airplane Hijackings, From the Cold War to D.B. Cooper’, Janet Bednarek, The Conversation, 18-Jul-2022, www.smithsonianmag.com).
Endnote: Hollywood embraces the sub-genre The skyjacking phenomena of the Seventies provided cinema and television with a rich vein of subject material. A seemingly endless stream of movies have gone the aircraft hijack scenario route for their plot action – just a sample of the better known titles include Skyjacked, Airport ‘77, The Delta Force, Air Force One, Passenger 57, United 93, Mogadishu and The Hijacking of Flight 3754⃞. The “Take me to Cuba” trope was a recurring motif on ‘70s TV comedy sketches from the likes of Monty Python et al, with predictable jocular takes on the hijacking “craze”.
1⃞ hijackings with a destination of Havana, Cuba, were so prevalent in this period that (according to Brendan I Koerner in his book The Skies Belong To Us) American airline captains were given maps of the Caribbean and Spanish-language guides in the event of just such a diversion (“TWA85: ‘The world’s longest and most spectacular hijacking’”, Roland Hughes, BBC News, 27-Oct-2019, www.bbc.com)
2⃞ the Felső-Szilvás episode had echoes in the Cold War climate of the late 1940s with a series of skyjackings (in Rome, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia) by anti-communists trying to escape communist rule in the Eastern Bloc
3⃞ by a stroke of considerable bad luck Rickard was again the unfortunate victim of an hijack 30 years later while piloting Continental Airlines Flight 54 in 1961
4⃞ and any flagging in the sub-genre’s popularity by around the turn of the century was revived by the events of 9/11 in 2001
