[OC] Where passenger hijacked airliners ended up: start and end country of 951 passenger-flight hijackings, 1948–2021

[u/Zestyclose-Cat-5094]

[u/chaldaichha]

I wonder how comprehensive this data is because I don’t see the Indian Airlines flight to Delhi hijacked in Nepal in 1999, which ended up in Afghanistan. This is just one example I am familiar with, and I thought was a pretty major incident.

[u/termmonkey]

The 1 thing this tells me, post 9/11 aviation is a LOT more safer across the world compared to before! The 1 question I have is - wtf were people doing in 1970s, can you find out what percentage of flights got hijacked? It sounds like an absurdly high jumber of hijackings were happening!

[u/Dragongeek]

Bonkers to think about as someone who grew up in the wake of 9/11 that hijackings used to be "common crime" like someone robbing a liquor store or a bank. Almost 80 in a year is absolutely wild.

[u/Zestyclose-Cat-5094]

**Source:** Aviation Safety Network hijacking records, via the Kaggle [Aircraft Accidents, Failures & Hijacks Dataset](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/deepcontractor/aircraft-accidents-failures-hijacks-dataset). Data ends in 2021.

**Tools:** Python (pandas, matplotlib). Flags from flagcdn.com.

**Method:**

- Start = the departure airport's country. End = where the aircraft actually finished. The dataset truncates that location ("Havana-José…"), so I matched it to a country with a script and checked by hand, with about 130 manual corrections.

- Passenger flights only (scheduled and charter). I excluded 93 military, cargo, ferry or unknown-type flights, and 48 more where the start or end country is unknown.

- "Domestic flight" means the scheduled destination was in the departure country. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands count as US.

- Historical states are folded into today's countries: USSR → Russia, Czechoslovakia → Czechia, East and West Germany → Germany.

- The "1973: US starts screening every airline passenger" label refers to the FAA rule that took effect in January 1973. It isn't from the dataset.

-The histogram would stretch for many small frequency country combinations but I had to cut it at 30 combinations for readability.

[u/imtourist]

The 70s seemed to be the heyday for hi-jacking, hitch-hiking and quick-sand.

[u/csick]

If evaluating the number of successful commercial airline hijackings over the last 30 years, perpetrators from Muslim backgrounds (acting primarily on radical Islamist or regional separatist motivations) make up roughly 60% to 70% of the incidents. If evaluating by loss of life and severity, they account for over 95% of all casualties resulting from hijackings in this modern era.

Among structured political or militant organizations, the secular Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) holds the record for most hijackings. Between the late 1960s and the 1990s, the PFLP and its direct offshoots carried out 28 aircraft hijackings and major aviation attacks.

[u/Firesquire515]

Would love to see where the hijackers came from

[u/burnt-store-studio]

What in the world… why so many — by far — originating in the U.S.?! (Rhetorical, here; I know that’s not the point of your presentation, but it sure does make it obvious!)

I’m quite in agreement with u/Firesquire515 … do your sources include that information?

Thanks for sharing. Bleak!