I’m going to put a big fat Citation Needed on that one. I don’t see how it would have helped in the 1970s. The hijackers take over the rest of the plane and say they’re going to execute one passenger every hour unless the pilots take them to Cuba. Are we expecting the pilots to say, nope, we’re safe, execute whoever you want?
9/11 was a game changer becasue it was a completely new kind of hijacking where the hijackers have no demands and everybody dies quickly if the hijacking goes according to plan. Reinforced doors are useful there, becasue threats to the passengers don’t hold weight when you know they’ll all die anyway if you open the door. That was very much not the case in the 70s.
Wouldn't it make sense in that case to just pretend it was a "regular" hijacking? Why should you go "hey pilots, open the doors or not, everyone is gonna die anyways." Vs. Open the door now or we'll kill a passenger every 10 minutes."
That won't work, because the protocol has changed. No pilot today will open the door, even as someone dies every 20 minutes. The pilots will divert to the closest airport and land.
There's plenty of blackbox recordings and transcripts out there of pilots losing control and freaking out instead of trying to stay calm and try to fix the situation. Most recent example is lion air. How the fuck can you seriously think every pilot on this planet would stay calm, act absolutely rationally and not panic if they can hear people being shot behind a closed door, especially if they'd been told they can make it stop by opening the door? That's like a hundred times more psychological stress. Seems like you should get out some time, have interactions with real people.
Considering letting the pilot take control of the controls far more likely increases the casualty count to everyone on board + far more people on the ground, so I believe landing is still the better option and is something that pilots can learn.
Yes, that is some flawless logic. Also, if you were a pilot losing control of your airplane, the best thing to do would be to stay calm, quickly analyze the solution, go through appropriate checklists and try to fix the situation. That's something pilots can learn. I would actually go as far as claim that's what they're actually taught. However if you search on YouTube, you'll find quite some voice recordings of crashed flights where you can clearly infer from the recording that panic seemed to guide the actions in the cockpit. I think this is far more likely to increase the chances of the pilots failing to regain control of the aircraft, leading to a lot of deaths. So I wouldn't bet on those very same people to always think as rationally as you described here. Rational thinking and panic usually don't work together that well.
Would you believe a hijacker who said that? No. After 9/11, you assume that all hijackers are on a suicide mission and the only way you survive is to defeat them before they can carry it out.
9/11 was a game changer becasue it was a completely new kind of hijacking where the hijackers have no demands and everybody dies quickly if the hijacking goes according to plan. Reinforced doors are useful there, becasue threats to the passengers don’t hold weight when you know they’ll all die anyway if you open the door. That was very much not the case in the 70s.