Baggage screening was instituted following the 1972 Oak Ridge hijacking. One escaped convict and two suspected rapists threatened to crash the DC-9 flight they'd commandeered into an Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear facility, if they did not receive 10 million dollars.
By January 1973, a law requiring that all passengers and carry on luggage be screened had passed. With the law came security technology of a new sort: X-ray machines and metal detectors, which were known at the time as magetometers.
These new technologies were far from foolproof. As Malcolm Gladwell notes of the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, attributed to Hezbollah,"terrorists bypassed the X-ray machines and the metal detectors by using members of the cleaning staff to stash guns and grenades in a washroom of the plane."
"Also see:
- Metal Detectors
- History of Metal Detectors
- Safety in the Skies, a 2001 article by Malcolm Gladwell