One of the things I remember commenting after September 11th, was “Well, that officially ends airline hijacking”.
Prior to 9/11 it had seemed to generally be in the hostage’s best interests to sit quiet and wait to be released/rescued. The likelihood of getting harmed by cooperating was sufficiently low as to discourage heroics.
After 9/11 that all changed, and my assertion was that anyone who tried to hijack a plane would be assaulted by every able bodied passenger on the plane because the odds had now swung to being “moderate chance of getting hurt attacking the hijacker” vs. “certain death if they kamikaze the plane into something”.
So it seemed that the in convenience and additional billions spent on upgrading airport security was probably a little hollow, because the most effective deterrent was the knowledge that not only would any future hijacking fail, it would probably fail in a manner that involved the passengers beating the hijacker to death in the process.
And now (and I’ve actually seen several stories similar to this one in the past few years) I’ve been proven right (at least in this one instance).