This is exactly right. Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.

Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...

Alternatively: if you flew Southwest prior to 9/11, other passengers would absolutely murder you if you threatened to go in the cockpit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_17...

Post 9/11 everyone else just caught up (except minus the actually killing the person), see e.g. the shoe bomber guy.

>Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.

Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”

… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.

[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.