LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Aircraft Hijacking
built 128 days ago
Aircraft hijacking is the take-over of an aircraft, by a (usually) armed person or group. Unlike the hijacking of land vehicles, it is usually not perpetrated in order to rob the cargo. Rather, most aircraft hijackings are committed to use the passengers as hostages and to obtain transport to a location. In the September 11 Terrorist Attack, 2001, the use of hijacked planes as suicide missiles changed the way hijacking was perceived as a security threat.
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Airport security has been a major concern for decades due the vulnerability of commercial aircraft to hijacking. The first recorded aircraft hijacking was in the early 1930s, but there was a large increase in the number of hijacked aircraft in the late 1960s, initially to Cuba but later to the Middle East. Since then, the number of hijackings has decreased, but the horrific events of September 11, 2001 placed airport security in the limelight again. The result has been a worldwide crash effort to develop and deploy technologies to prevent terrorists from gaining access to aircraft.
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The first recorded aircraft hijacking in the Middle East occurred some thirteen years before the creation of the PFLP. In December 1954, Israeli military jets intercepted a civilian aircraft in Syrian airspace that had recently taken off from Damascus, and forced it to land within Israeli territory. Syrian passengers were detained for 48 hours, pending negotiations over the fate of five Israeli soldiers who had been captured inside Syrian territory while mounting wiretapping installations.
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A method for controlling an aircraft in an aircraft hijacking situation to prevent unauthorized control over the aircraft to be performed. The method is especially characterized in that a person intended to perform authorized control over the aircraft, such as the pilot of the aircraft, activates a different control system which puts at least a part of the ordinary control system out of function.
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The first recorded aircraft hijack was on February 21 1931 in Arequipa, Peru. Byron Rickards flying a Ford Tri-motor was approached on the ground by armed revolutionaries. He refused to fly them anywhere and after a ten day stand-off Rickards was informed that the revolution was successful and he could go in return for giving one of their number a lift to Lima. Most hijacking have not been so farcical. The first hijack of an airliner probably happened on July 16, 1948 when a failed attempt to gain control of a Cathay Pacific causes it to crash into the sea off Macao.
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Counselor Raviv of the Israeli Embassy called on the Department to discuss the upcoming ICAO meeting to consider the Lebanese complaint about Israel's Beirut airport raid and Israel's counter-complaint about the Athens hijacking of an El Al aircraft. The U.S. position was that the UN Security Council should deal with the political aspects of the problem, while the ICAO concentrated on safeguarding international civil aviation.
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Aircraft Hijacking