Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Grimburger 1177 days ago
There's been dozens of hijackings since 9/11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...

3 comments

To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.
It has to do with several things, among them you have:

- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)

- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.

It's completely due to prior to 9/11 you left the hijackers alone and they would land the plane, get arrested or die in a shootout with the police.

Now if you attempt to hijack a plane 100-300 passengers will beat your ASS and stop you before you get anywhere near control of the aircraft.

There will never be another hijacking attack where the pilot loses control of the plane from a threat of a would be hijacker.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hijackings occurred, on average, once every five days globally.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-ai...

That lists twenty, and the minimum to be "dozens" would be 24.
Grammatically, 1.5 donut is wrong and 1.5 donuts is correct. So, in this case "1.66~ dozens" (because 20 / 12 = 1.66~) is pedantically correct.

(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)

Grammatically, 0.2 donut is wrong also. So by that logic, 0.01 also counts as dozens.

I'd argue that "dozens" obviously means there are a multiple of 12.