Conceptualizing the Hijacking Threat to Civil Aviation.

The threat to airline safety from hijacking may have been declining in the past couple of decades in terms of numbers of incidents, but the potential of increased harm from each individual attack has grown. In this "incident-driven" analysis of a new database of aircraft hijackings between 1993 and 2003, a taxonomy of hijacking is developed based on 27 characteristics of those incidents reported in open sources. One of the four clusters produced is shown to align with terrorist incidents. Characteristics such as the number of perpetrators, whether or not they were armed, whether the perpetrators were affiliated with formal organizations, whether the flight was domestic or international, and the country of flight origination were all critical in forming the clusters. The four groups differed significantly in terms of the type(s) of strategies effective in resolving the attack and the likelihood of the success of those efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]