courtesy Library of Congress
Commercial plane travel expanded after World War II, but it remained too expensive for most people. In the 1970s and the 1980s, price deregulation opened air travel to millions more, in the United States.
As plane travel broadened, the use of the new technology as a vehicle for criminal activity did as well. The hijacking of American planes en route to Cuba was a regular occurrence in the 1960s. Most of these hijackings would not be considered terrorism because they lacked political purpose. Rather, hijackers sought transportation, either into or out of Castro's post-revolution Cuba.
These domestic hijackings led to the first attempts to monitor and control airline travel. According to Timothy Naftali in Blind Spot, the Secret History of American Counterterrorism, "After the tenth U.S. Commercial jetliner of 1968 was hijacked on July 19, the FAA began sending a very small number of armed plainclothes officers on board selected flights headed to Florida."
History of Air Travel on About.com
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