Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

10 • AIR TRAVEL SECURITYAIR TRAVEL SECURITY. Airline traffic has been an attractive targetfor terrorist attacks since the early 1960s, with two main typesof attacks: airplane hijackings, with or without a barricade hostagesituation, and bombings of airliners in flight. Airline traffic has becomeincreasingly more attractive as a target for terrorism since moreAmericans fly internationally than any other nationality, making up40 percent of passengers worldwide, while a significant portion ofinternational air traffic is routed through the United States. Othernations, particularly in Western Europe and Israel, whose nationalshave been frequently targeted, also have found threats to their air carriersto be a great problem.Bombings directed at airliners are relatively cost-effective comparedto bombing attacks directed at stationary structures, such asbuildings or commercial installations, and tend to be nearly completelylethal to their targets. The bombs that destroyed Air IndiaFlight 182, Pan Am Flight 103, and UTA Flight 772 were muchsmaller than the bombs used to damage the Murrah building in OklahomaCity, the World Trade Center in New York, and the KhobarTowers in Saudi Arabia; whereas the number of those killed in thoseground bombing attacks was exceeded by the number of those thatsurvived those attacks, in every one of the cited airliner bombings,not one passenger or crew member survived. Also, whereas thebombings of fixed physical structures have left sufficient forensicevidence to allow possible identification of the attackers, the physicalevidence of an aerial bombing tends to be strewn over a largegeographical area or else can be lost entirely, as in the case of the AirIndia bombing, which occurred over the open seas, making identificationand detection of the perpetrators much more difficult. Unlikeground-based physical structures, it is virtually impossible to hardenairplanes so that they can survive a bombing, and even a minor explosionin an airplane in flight may be sufficient to ensure catastrophicfailure of the plane.In the decade of the 1960s, hijacking—or “skyjacking” as it becamepopularly known—was the main form of terrorist attack onair traffic. After three hijackings of American airliners to Cuba in1961, President John F. Kennedy commissioned an interagency taskforce with finding ways to prevent “air piracy,” as hijacking becameknown. Most of the more than 200 hijackings occurring during the1960s, of which 80 involved American carriers, were carried out by