Lower Manhattan before the September 11 terror attacks, featuring the former World Trade Center on May 18, 1995. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., a retired US Air Force general and then the Assistant Secretary of Transportation, met with government officials and corporate executives to discuss terrorism and aviation security on September 11, 1974, in the North Tower. Twenty-seven years later, the towers fell to a terrorist attack. Chris Naylor recounts efforts to protect civilians and commercial airlines from “skyjackings.”(Shutterstock/Meunierd)

The Untold Pre-History of 9/11

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As the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks approaches, we should remember that the events of that day were far from unforeseeable.

Standing on the 55th floor of One World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, Assistant Secretary of Transportation Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. gazed upon an audience of government and private-sector security professionals. His subject: the US government’s approach to the relatively recent phenomenon of terrorist hijacking. As the architect of the federal sky marshal program, Davis offered no easy assurances about the escalating threat. Fighting terror, he admitted, presented no quick solutions. Rather, it demanded constant vigilance, because, as Davis noted, “a great deal can be done before a tragedy demands the action that should have previously been taken.” Addressing the solemn room in the North Tower, Davis gave voice to the single greatest fear haunting the aviation industry: an airborne mass-casualty event.

Eight months after he concluded 33 years of distinguished military service, Lt. Gen. Davis—West Point graduate, legendary commander of the Tuskegee airmen, the first African American general in the US Air Force, and the son of the first Black general in American history—now found himself spearheading the anti-hijacking efforts of the federal government. When President Richard Nixon tapped Davis to confront the new and growing threat, the nation was summoning an old pilot for one last journey.

Largely forgotten today, the US government’s decades-long quest to contain and prevent hijackings unfolded in a series of warnings, shifting security postures, evolving threats, and missed opportunities. The attacks of September 11, 2001, which marked the dawn of the new millennium and appeared to many like a wholly new phenomenon, were, in fact, the culmination of decades of changing terrorist tactics, systemic aviation vulnerabilities, and institutional failures to recognize and address known threats.

The Age of Terrorist Skyjackings

Domestic air travel in the 1960s was quite different from what we know today. Passengers would arrive at the airport with a ticket in hand, traverse all the way to the departure gate escorted by family or friends, and often walk right onto the tarmac and up a staircase to board the airplane—while facing virtually no screening, identity check, or other security protocols. A considerable number of individuals in the United States took advantage of this situation to hijack airplanes as a means of transport to Cuba or for financial extortion. Because screening procedures were minimal and cockpit access was too often relatively open, these “skyjackings,” as they came to be known, were difficult to prevent. At the same time, a more organized and politically motivated terrorist threat to aviation was forming overseas.

By the time President Nixon took office in January 1969, the United States and its allies confronted a new type of threat to civil aviation. Founded in 1967 to liberate Palestine through armed struggle, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) quickly recognized the inherent vulnerabilities of commercial air travel. Between 1968 and 1969, the group ushered in the era of modern aviation terrorism through a series of attacks against El Al and TWA aircraft across Europe, including tarmac shootouts in Athens and Zurich and mid-air hijackings out of Rome. The threat of hijackings and hostage-taking evolved to mass-casualty sabotage in February 1970, when a bomb linked to Palestinian militants detonated in the rear cargo compartment of Swissair Flight 330, causing the aircraft to crash and killing all 47 people aboard.

On September 6, 1970, the PFLP launched an operation using two-person teams to hijack four commercial airliners departing for New York City simultaneously. The hijacking of the El Al flight was thwarted mid-air when armed sky marshals shot and killed the male hijacker and subdued his female accomplice. Two other operatives rejected by El Al for that same flight purchased tickets and hijacked Pan Am Flight 93 instead, evacuating the occupants and destroying the plane after landing in Cairo. The hijackers of separate TWA and Swissair flights successfully diverted the aircraft to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned British airbase in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers and crew became hostages.

The crisis then unexpectedly expanded three days later when the PFLP hijacked a fifth aircraft, bringing it to the desert airstrip to extort the release of the surviving El Al hijacker. As the standoff ensued over the next several days, the PFLP demanded the release of numerous terrorists held in several countries in exchange for releasing the hostages. President Nixon recognized the hijackings not merely as security failures but as an attack on the US economy and national security—and determined that the federal government must take the lead.

On September 11, after days of strategizing, Nixon unveiled a sweeping anti-hijacking plan. The measures placed armed federal personnel aboard US commercial flights, expanded airport screening, and accelerated efforts to detect weapons and explosives. They strengthened the collection and sharing of relevant intelligence with airlines and law enforcement personnel. 

The commander-in-chief needed a strong, courageous leader to implement this ambitious aviation security program, bound to alter the air traveler’s experience. For this, he turned to Lt. Gen. Davis, who started work on September 21 as director of Civil Aviation Security at the Department of Transportation.

President Nixon meets with Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe and Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., on September 21, 1970, in the Oval Office. (Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library)

Davis immediately began studying other countries’ approaches. His first major initiative was to scale up a sky marshal program to more than 1,700 armed officers protecting commercial aviation in flight. Next, he targeted the airlines’ lax screening and inconsistent implementation of the new federal security procedures. At an international meeting on transportation and security on January 11, 1971, he noted that four recent hijackings could easily have been prevented if the airlines had simply adhered to the new protocols. 

In March, Davis went further, urging airline crews to resist hijackers when appropriate rather than simply complying with their demands. This public stance aligned with internal communications between Davis and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator John Shaffer regarding the need to provide special training to air crews to react with force if faced with a suicidal hijacker.

Little remembered today, Davis—“the hijacking guy,” as Nixon and his aides called the general on the White House tapes—became something of a celebrity as he waged parallel campaigns, in private and in public, to raise awareness of the perils of modern air travel. Tall and slender with a trimmed pencil mustache, Davis favored Japanese watches. He appeared as a guest on The Mike Douglas Show alongside Dionne Warwick and Leslie Uggams, obligingly demonstrated new magnetometer devices for newsmen, and drew “roars of laughter” when he related that “One airline told us they handle luggage so roughly that no explosive could survive the loading process.”

Following his initial successes, Davis was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Safety and Consumer Affairs on August 3, 1971. In this role, he spent the next several years working with the FAA, airlines, and airports nationwide to establish a comprehensive Civil Aviation Security System.

Terrorist attacks were becoming increasingly brazen and violent, culminating in the televised massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The danger to civil aviation, however, was not limited to organized international terrorism. On November 10, 1972, three men armed with handguns and grenades hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49 shortly after it departed from Birmingham, Alabama, and demanded $10 million. During the ensuing negotiations, the hijackers threatened to crash the aircraft into a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as they circled the facility from above; the 30-hour ordeal ended when the aircraft landed in Havana, and Cuban authorities arrested the hijackers. 

The Oak Ridge episode provided the immediate catalyst for a security measure Davis had long urged. On December 5, the Department of Transportation announced that, beginning January 5, 1973, all passengers and their carry-on baggage would be screened before they boarded flights operated by US carriers. The nationwide requirement represented a great leap forward in aviation security and effectively ended the “transport to Cuba” incidents, leading to a major drawdown of the sky marshal program. Hijackings of US commercial flights sharply declined, but the underlying threat to civil aviation did not.

The Rise of Suicide Pilots

The possibility that terrorists might deliberately crash an aircraft into a populated target had already entered discussions at the highest levels of government. In January 1973, investigative journalist Jack Anderson reported that US........

© The National Interest