Canadian hostages in Jamaican airport

by Tom Johansmeyer on

One man with a gun can do a lot of damage. A weapon-wielding nut-job held around 180 hostages on a Canadian plane in Jamaica yesterday. He chose the landing in Jamaica as his time to act. All passengers were eventually released unharmed, but five of the original seven crew members were still held hostage in the CanJet plane at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay. (CNN reports that he’s holding six crew members.)

Only one shot has been fired, but nobody was hurt.

According to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, “It’s likely that two of the crew members may be locked up in the cockpit.”

CanJet says in a statement on its website, “A full security operation is underway and CanJet is cooperating fully with the local authorities.”

At approximately 11:30 PM local time yesterday, a man found his way onto chartered Flight 918, thanks to the effectiveness of fake identification cards at the airport’s employee entrance.

The latest development is that police are negotiating with the hostage-taker. He has asked for passage to Cuba.

Drunk Man Tries to Hijack Turkish Airlines Flight

by Josh Lew on

A man on a Turkish Airlines flight from the resort town of Antalya, Turkey to the Russian city of St. Petersburg threatened to blow up the plane unless it was diverted. The man, who appeared to be drunk, approached a flight attendant and handed her a note to give to the pilot: “I have a bomb. If you don’t take me in (the cockpit) I will blow it up,” As he stumbled toward the front of the plane, he was overpowered by passengers. No explosives were found despite his insistence that there was a bomb strapped on his body. He appeared so inebriated that passengers did not take him seriously.

Turkish journalists have reported that the man was an Uzbek national, but his identity and true nationality have not yet been confirmed. After he was subdued, the plane continued on to its destination, though Turkish Airlines officials briefly considered setting it down immediately as a precaution. There were 167 passengers on board the aircraft, an Airbus A-320.

Source

What other trouble is up in the skies?


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How Would You Hijack an Airplane?

by Jonathon Morgan on

You know how in movies the bad guys always come up with a nearly air-tight plot to destory America, mankind, or whatever — only to be thwarted in the final hour by death-defying heroics?

Bruce Schneier, author of the Schneier on Security blog, things there’s some similarities between those seemingly plausible plans for destruction, and the ongoing battle between would-be terrorists and the TSA: We screened for guns and bombs, so the terrorists used box cutters. We took away box cutters and small knives, so they hid explosives in their shoes. We started screening shoes, so they planned to use liquids…

As such, he’s started a contest: invent your own terrorist hijacking plot.

Here’s the idea: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.

Think you have what it takes to invent something so terrifying — yet plausible — that the TSA would be forced to ban wristwatches? Zippers over three inches long?

Give it a shot in the comments section of this post on Schneier’s blog.

[via BoingBoing]

How To Stop A Hijacker

by Jonathon Morgan on

Shortly after an Air Mauritania flight took off on Thursday evening, it was hijacked by a gunman. But thanks to a rough landing, forewarned passengers were able douse the hijacker in boiling water, tackle, and restrain him.

The turning point came when the pilot realized the gunman, Mohamed Abderraman, didn’t speak French. Using the plane’s public address system, the pilot then alerted the passengers — in French — to his plan to take the plane down hard. After warning women and children to move to the back of the plane, the pilot broke abruptly upon landing, then quickly sped up — throwing Abderraman off-balance, and giving the passengers the chance they’d been waiting for.

Abderraman wasn’t a terrorist, but instead wanted the plane to fly to France so he could request political asylum. Upon arriving at Gando airport outside Las Palmas — the plane’s original destination — he was arrested by Spanish police.

That’s one quick-thinking pilot, and a plane full of heroic passengers.

Woman Imagines Terrorist Hijacking, Refuses To Stop Using Cell Phone In Flight

by Jonathon Morgan on

Erin Callahan Lambert got drunk and did some really, really stupid things on a flight from Boston to San Francisco last Sunday. Now she’s facing federal charges for making comments about a hijacking, trying to open a cabin door and fighting with flight attendants.

It all started to go awry when Lambert began talking on her cell phone halfway through the flight. When attendants asked her to stop, she became “combative.” Then, she claimed that she was “calling 911 because the plane is being hijacked.”

But it gets better (or worse, I suppose). After the first episode was diffused, Lambert later got up again, this time trying to take her luggage and her pet carrier into the bathroom. When flight attendants confronted her a second time, she said “…you are going to have to kill me and my dog.”

After a brief struggle, the nutcase was finally handcuffed, and, upon landing, turned over to San Francisco airport police. Thank goodness no one was hurt!