Trans Australia Airlines Flight 408 - Wikipedia

TIL about Trans Australia Airlines Flight 408 where in 1960 an Australian pilot punched an armed hijacker and disarmed his bomb

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Australia_Airlines_Flight_408

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Hildebrandt was sentenced to three years in jail for attempted murder, 10 years for attempting to destroy the aircraft and two years for the explosives charge. He successfully appealed the sentence in the Queensland Criminal Court as he argued that the aircraft which was 35 minutes into the flight, was over New South Wales (NSW) when he armed the explosives in the aircraft toilet. He served a three-year sentence in Brisbane, for attempted murder and on discharge was arrested by detectives from NSW. He faced court again and was convicted on the charge of attempted destruction of an aircraft and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in NSW.

So these were basically all state-level charges, it didn’t trigger a higher national-level charge?

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Something that never made sense to me about 9/11 is how did the hijackers succeed against 200+ people while armed with some box cutters?

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The attitude regarding hijackers was different at the time - most hijackers were there for money or political stunts, often taking planes as they were full of hostages with few exits. Most of the time hijackings were not much worse than a bank robbery: starting trouble would make it worse for everyone and if you just waited it out, the hijackers would be on their way to other mischief.

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How do you think?

Until then, that had never happened. Why try to get yourself killed disarming a hijacker when you know (believe) that you’re just going to an airfield somewhere, wait for a long time, and then get liberated?

These people had no idea they were going to be used as a flying weapons platform

Flight 93 passengers did learn about this and did fight back, the hijacker them just flew the plane into the ground to kill them all and avoid capture

Fucking coward maniacs

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