From that link, there were 137 hijacking attempts in the U.S. between 1968-1972, and 90 of them had Cuba as the destination. Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.
Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
> Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.
Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
Many other countries are also non-extradition to the US, for various reasons including reciprocity and how the US treats its criminals. It’s definitely not unique to Cuba.
Presumably hijackers would just go to the next nearest country with no extradition policy. Honestly though I’ve never heard of “preventing hijackers” proposed as a reason for wanting to normalize relations with communist Cuba. You realize there are no hijackers anymore right? Additionally, there are many US citizens and corporations with valid and verifiable claims to property confiscated by the communist government in Cuba. Normalizing relations would obviously require a resolution to this situation.
>Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
>People are terrible at judging risk.
And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
Reminds me of the study that showed that the increase in US car fatalities in the 2 years after 9/11 because everyone was scared of flying was comparable to the number of people who died in 9/11. Right 9/11 was arguably the safest time to fly.
That's pretty short-sighted. Plane hijackings are very dangerous situations and large death tolls, enormous investigations, threaten air travel, etc from a single event. I don't think the nerd calculus about the number of deaths from car crashes tells the whole story. 1968-1972 was also a different time from now and there is a lot more air travel and many more unstable people in this country. In the 1960s, the word "fascist" didn't mean "someone I didn't vote for" and words like genocide, oppression, etc mean far different things today and all this results in a lot more potential problems. Should TSA be a lot better, do they screw up a lot, is a lot of it a bit silly? Sure, but the idea that we just say "oh, well, there are a lot more car crashes so let's just no secure air travel" is just hard to take seriously. Sometimes doesn't simple nerd calculus doesn't tell the whole story. But, people always like to make claims like "people are so bad at determining" and it's a kind of unintended (usually) condescension but I think it's really a Dunning-Kruger thing. There are real reasons why simply comparing hijacking deaths to car crash deaths is not so simple that it leads to the conclusion that we shouldn't spend much money it. I've also seen ridiculous statements like that we only focus on airports because "lawmakers fly a lot more than normal people" it's crazy-talk.
Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
People are terrible at judging risk.