Hijacking

Airplane’s risk is not limited to crashing on the ground. During you’re on board, you might experience another risk that your airplane is hijacked. Today airports give security checks so severely that it’s almost impossible to bring any weapons for hijacking into the inside of airplanes as you may know when you walk through the gates. Despite such strict preventive actions, we have been still seeing some hijackings all over the world. Japan is also unexceptional.

There have been 17 hijackings which happened in Japan(as of 2000). In the 17, most of the cases were political or ideological. On the other hand in the past decade as we see outstanding three hijacking cases, the motives of all the hijackers were not clear.

In the case in 1995, for example, a former banker calling himself a follower of the Aum cult hijacked an airplane for Hokkaido only with a screwdriver. Fifteen hours later after the airplane landed, he was captured by rushing police. He said he wanted to kill the cult's guru, Asahara by releasing him because the guru shifted his responsibility to his followers in the courts for a series of the cult's wrongdoings. Since the hijacker had complicated private troubles and also said at the same time that he wanted to die cool, his true motives are not still sure.

The last case in the 20^th century, which occurred in 1999 was incomprehensible as well. A hijacker who had good educational backgrounds found a loophole to bring a kitchen knife into the airplane without passing it through the walk gate. The demand of his intellectual trial was the desire to pilot the airplane. His dream in the childhood had been achieved for a short time. But no sooner the hijacker griped the control stick, than the airplane nose dove to 200 meters from the ground. Seeing his miss control the crew including the vice pilot held him down. Unfortunately the pilot was killed for his struggle not to give the control to the hijacker. This was the first time to be victimized in the past hijacking cases. Thanks to the brave pilot and the great efforts by the Japanese aviation industry to secure the passenger's safety, amazingly no airplane passenger has been victimized in the history of the Japanese hijacking.

However, it's premature to jump on the conclusion that the Japanese air is the safest in the event of hijacking. Japan once before put the rest of the world into a dangerous situation when a Japanese airplane was hijacked by the student terrorist group, the Red Army in 1977. The hijackers demanded the government that it pay six million dollars and release the members of the group behind bars in exchange with the hostages. The Prime Minister at that time accepted the demands by saying that human life was heavier than the earth. The government had to think of the passengers' life first, but simultaneously gave the impression that hijacking Japanese airplanes would be successful to potential hijackers. Of course there are some steps to deal with hijackers. As long as we see foreign deal with hijacking cases, they don't compromise with hijackers. To see the French authority rushing special teams into the airplane immediately in the recent worldwide case happened in 1997, we have to take rigid attitudes against hijackers.