.
Letter by the Bed
When I was writing my post, the plot of the hijacking just fell into place. It didn’t occur to
me that it was a different time in the United States that I had lived thru and many people
wouldn’t catch the references to the planes circling the airport and the hijacking.
.
For anyone that is interested in what it was like in 1971 I searched and found the following
information on Wikipedia and a couple of other sites listed with the information.
————————————————————————————————————
- What Flying was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s
- Why planes circled the airports on a regular basis
- www.thepeoplehistory.com/1970s.
- Flying was expensive.
- A round trip ticket between Cleveland and Washington D.C. was about $75.
- This doesn’t sound like a bad deal, until you adjust the fare for inflation:
- That’s over $400 in today’s dollars!
- There was no point in shopping around for the best deal,
- because all airfares were controlled by regulation. I
- f a roundtrip ticket between Cleveland and Washington was $75 on one airline,
- it was $75 on all the airlines.
- Because it was so expensive, flying was rare,
- and it was an “event.”
- The expectation was that you would wear nice clothing onto the flight.
- Anyone who had strolled onto an airplane in the 1960′s or early 1970′s in a sweatsuit, or ragged jeans and a tee shirt, would have caused a major buzz among the passengers.
- No security procedures of any consequence.
- You walked up to the ticket counter,
- bought your ticket,
- showed no identification,
- walked out unsupervised onto the tarmac,
- and climbed up the stairs and onto the plane.
- Meeting an arriving flight?
- Just stroll on over to the gate and greet them as they walk off the plane.
.
- There were observation decks at many airports.
- With little concern about security,
- some airports allowed you to stroll outside, take a seat,
- and watch the airplanes come and go.
- On a warm summer night, it was actually rather pleasant
.
- No little television screens scattered throughout the airport to tell you where you where your flight was.
- There was only one big board in the main lobby, like a bus station.
- Forgot your gate? You had to go find the big board to look it up.
.
- The vast majority of the passengers were businessmen.
- White male businessmen.
- Occasional families.
- Very few minorities, and
- virtually no women traveling independently.
.
- The stewardesses were pretty young women in very short skirts.
- “We have the sexiest stewardesses” seemed to be a major advertising theme among the airlines.
- Their tiny skirts were designed to ride way up when they reached into the overhead compartments,
- or when they bent over to serve drinks to the passengers seated near the windows.
- This was intended no doubt for the entertainment of the largely male passengers.
.———————————————————————————–
The FAA established a Central Flow Control Facility in April 1970, to prevent clusters of congestion from disrupting the nationwide air traffic flow.
====
On March 25, 1970, the newly designated union orchestrated a controller “sickout”
to protest many of the FAA actions that they felt were unfair;
over 2,000 controllers around the country did not report to work as scheduled
and informed management that they were ill.
.
The sickout led officials to recognize that the ATC system was operating nearly at capacity.
.
wikipedia
==========================
Due in part to the increased use of the 747 a Jumbo Jet
- able to carry large numbers of passengers across continents
- air travel booms and
- caused new problems with pollution,
- delays and
- air traffic control.
.
If there were problems with the weather, delays on take offs, t
here were an inadequate number of runways for the number of take offs and landings.
Planes would circle the airports or go to another near by airport
and transport people to the correct airport.
www.thepeoplehistory.com/1970s.
.
==============================================
I myself remember sitting in a long line of airplanes waiting to take off…
the people in the window seats would give a “play by play”
of take offs and landings and how many plane they could see in line.
==============================================
The Air Traffic Control system in the 1970s was operating nearly at capacity.
To alleviate some of this,
- Congress accelerated the installation of automated systems,
- reopened the air traffic controller training academy in Oklahoma City,
- began hiring air traffic controllers at an increasing rate,
- and raised salaries to help attract and retain controllers.
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (1968)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
==============================================
Why someone would believe in the spring of 1971
that a plane had been hijacked to Cuba from OHare, Chicago
1970
- May 25 A man successfully hijacks a 727 from Chicago to Cuba.
1971
- January 22, 1971 A man successfully hijacks a 727 from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Cuba;
- he would have gone to Algeria, if possible. Milwaukee is not far from Chicago
- February 4 A man successfully hijacks a DC-9 from Chicago to Cuba.
- September 3 A man born in Cuba, attempts to hijack a plane from Chicago to Cuba;
he is sentenced to 20 years for interference with a flight crew on March 6, 1972.
