Conceptualizing the Hijacking Threat to Civil Aviation

DOI10.1177/0734016807306152
Published date01 September 2007
Date01 September 2007
Subject MatterArticles
Conceptualizing the Hijacking
Threat to Civil Aviation
John M. Miller
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX
The threat to airline safety from hijacking may have been declining in the past couple of
decades in terms of numbers of incidents, but the potential of increased harm from each indi-
vidual attack has grown. In this “incident-driven” analysis of a new database of aircraft hijack-
ings between 1993 and 2003, a taxonomy of hijacking is developed based on 27 characteristics
of those incidents reported in open sources. One of the four clusters produced is shown to align
with terrorist incidents. Characteristics such as the number of perpetrators, whether or not they
were armed, whether the perpetrators were affiliated with formal organizations, whether the
flight was domestic or international, and the country of flight origination were all critical in
forming the clusters. The four groups differed significantly in terms of the type(s) of strategies
effective in resolving the attack and the likelihood of the success of those efforts.
Keywords: aircraft hijackings; terrorism; taxonomy
With a fleet of 18,000 aircraft, global aviation moves nearly 2 billion people each year.
Studies of global aviation’s worldwide growth potential project that the number of global
passengers will double by 2015 (Reed Business Information, 1999). This information is
sobering when one considers that the aviation industry has long been a target for terrorists.
In fact, the modern age of terrorism, characterized by the growth of extremist Islamist ter-
rorist groups, was precipitated by an act of terrorism against civil aviation. According to
Hoffman (1998),
The advent of what is considered modern international terrorism occurred on July 22, 1968.
On that day, three armed Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of six groups then comprising the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO), hijacked an Israeli El Al commercial flight en route from Rome to Tel
Aviv. (p. 67)
Before September 11, 2001, U.S. civil aviation was experiencing a peaceful period. It had
been a decade since a U.S. carrier was hijacked. It was asserted, albeit not without dispute,
that the counterterrorism policy in place had halted the hijacking problem so prevalent in
previous decades (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2004). However, hijackings
remained problematic elsewhere on the globe and, when the threat reached America’s
domestic front on 9/11, it clearly demonstrated itself as a truly sustained and potent threat.
209
Criminal Justice Review
Volume 32 Number 3
September 2007 209-232
© 2007 Georgia State University
Research Foundation, Inc.
10.1177/0734016807306152
http://cjr.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Authors’ Note: The author acknowledges the invaluable contributions of Adam Dulin. Partial funding of this
research was made available through the auspices of Richard Ward and the Institute for the Study of Violent
Groups (ISVG) at Sam Houston State University.
Experts recognize that aviation ranks high on the list of potential terrorist targets, both
for its newsworthiness and its ability to inflict mass casualties on a captive audience
(Wallis, 2003). International terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, who have professed the
goal of killing Americans through mass casualty incidents, are still active and have the
resources to continue mounting a campaign of terror (Karber, 2002; Sweet, 2004).
Criminals, too, represent a great threat to civil aviation. Criminal hijackers may be just
as dangerous as their terrorist counterparts, and their hijackings can, and have, resulted in
loss of life and serve as a catalyst for the negative economic, social, and political conse-
quences that often follow these highly publicized critical incidents.
To decrease the chance of such events occurring and to mitigate the deleterious impact of
those incidents that do occur, it is important to gain a better understanding of the problem on
a global, or macro, level as well as on an incident, or micro, level. One way to do address both
objectives is by developing a typology of the threat. This study focuses on a better under-
standing of hijacking incidents by examining and developing a typology using “real-time”
variables common to these incidents. The results of this study will shed light on the problem
and aid in future research.
On a broad level, typologies are necessary to create order out of data, to discover and/or
analyze relationships among relevant variables, and subsequently, to generate hypotheses
(Roberts, 1971). Such studies can also contribute to the understanding of a threat and aid
in efforts at reducing its occurrence (Fattah, 1981; Moser & Shrader, 1999). Bailey (1994)
summed up the advantages of typological research, as follows:
[A] well-constructed typology can be very effective in bringing order out of chaos. It can
transform the complexity of apparently eclectic congeries of diverse cases into well-ordered
sets of a few rather homogeneous types, clearly situated in a property space of a few impor-
tant dimensions. A sound typology forms a solid foundation for both theorizing and empirical
research. (p. 33)
This article will examine a new typology of hijackings that deviates from past work,
using well-established statistical clustering techniques available in most data-mining work-
benches today. We will look first in the following section briefly at past typologies and
place the current research in perspective. Then we present a recent history of actual, illus-
trative hijacking incidents that will examine some of the salient events from the past
decade, underscore the need for a new typology, and provide concrete examples of the inci-
dents and their descriptive dimensions that are used by the statistical techniques at the core
of this analysis. After a discussion of the clustering methodology that we used, the result-
ing new typology is presented, and we conclude with a discussion of the implications of the
typologies for law enforcement and airlines and future investigators.
Hijacking Typologies
Researchers examining hijackings have classified the threat into several different typolo-
gies. Based on demands that hijackers make, Holden (1986) developed two different types
of hijackings. The first was hijacking for transportation. This type of hijacking encom-
passes those people demanding to be transported to a particular destination. Holden stated
210 Criminal Justice Review

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