Since 9/11 this cliche has kind of gone away, but it used to be that when ever somebody on a comedy show was hijacking a plane, he (or she) wanted to go to Cuba. Is that based on a real hijacking? Why Cuba?
Good old Wiki!
Check this list out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuba-United_States_aircraft_hijackings
Cuba is close and doesn’t cooperate with the US Government. Hijacking a plane to Toronto or Bermuda isn’t going to get you much.
Given the OP’s username, I’m guessing it was in order to buy it: The Trouble with Trillions - Wikipedia
It probably became a cliche in the late 1960s. It was based on dozens of real hijackings; as the Wiki article shows, there were at least 48 hijackings to Cuba in 1968-1969 alone.
As I noted in another thread, I traveled legally to Cuba. There are a couple of flights a day to Havana out of Miami. When I went through security at the Miami airport on the way there I got full attention. They examined everything, gave me the pat down and really acted like jerks.
While going through this I was thinking, “What the hell do they think I’m going to do, hijack a plane to Cuba?”
Has 9-11 ruined the “market” for hijacking as much as I think it has? Immediately after, I thought, “No one will believe the old ‘I just want to go to Cuba’ thing any more. The passengers are very likely to rush the hijackers even if they think one of their own will be killed.”
I can’t remember a plane hijacking in America since. Did I miss some? The wiki article on notable hijackings shows none from America after 9-11-01.
The changes in on-board procedures have pretty well eliminated the potential to do hijacking in the US.
It’s much harder to break into the cockpit than it was.
On & before 9/11, airline procedures were to cooperate with the hijackers in hopes of not hurting any pax.
On 9/12 and after, the priority has shifted to protecting the poeple on the ground from the aircraft being used as a missile. The cabin crew & pax are forfeit.
We keep the door closed, land ASAP, and do our best to ignore any carnage taking place in the cabin. Once on the ground, we jump out the escape hatches & let the cops figure out how to deal with whatever’s still going on in the cabin.
If the bad guys blow us up before we get to the ground, oh well, it wasn’t our day.
Ugly, but true.
And yes, now that passengers have pretty well internalized this change in both our & the hijackers’ scripts, they’ll be motivated to deal with the hijacker(s) themselves pretty early in the process.
There have almost no hijackings that started in the US for twenty years prior to 9-11.
This list has a hijacking in 1994 of a Fed Ex flight by a Fex Exd employee.
The next previous hijacking that Started in the US was 1972
The list is notable hijackings so I could have missed some.
Sure, but I doubt that Fidel would appreciate you landing in Havana with a planeload of Americans just so you could steal money/wage jihad/get attention.