A retrospective published by The Daily Wire traces a six-decade pattern of airline hijackings and attacks that the outlet attributes to extremists originating from predominantly Muslim countries, stretching from secular Arab revolutionary groups in the 1960s through the September 11 attacks and into an alleged 2026 cockpit stabbing aboard a Flydubai flight.
According to The Daily Wire’s accounting, air travel has repeatedly been used as a stage for political violence, hostage diplomacy and mass murder, with skyjacking serving as a weapon of choice across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.
Palestinian Factions and the Birth of Modern Hijacking
The outlet credits Palestinian nationalist and left-wing factions β particularly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine β with pioneering modern aviation terror. It cites the 1968 takeover of an El Al jet that was diverted to Algiers and a 1969 TWA hijacking in which the nose section of the plane was blown up in Damascus as the opening of the modern hijacking era.
The 1970 Dawson’s Field episode occupies a prominent place in the Daily Wire timeline: the PFLP seized four airliners and eventually destroyed three empty passenger jets in the Jordanian desert. Two years later, Black September terrorists stormed a Sabena flight bound for Tel Aviv, and a Lufthansa jet was hijacked in an operation that pressured West Germany into releasing surviving attackers from the Munich Olympics massacre, in which 11 members of the Israeli team were killed.
The retrospective also notes Palestinian collaboration with international radicals in the 1973 Japan Airlines 404 and 1974 British Airways 870 incidents, which ended in aircraft explosions in Benghazi and a casualty in Tunis.
Entebbe, Mogadishu and the 1980s Spiral
The 1976 Air France 139 hijacking ended with an Israeli commando raid at Entebbe, an operation in which Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu β older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and commander of the Sayeret Matkal assault unit β was killed. The following year, German GSG 9 forces stormed the hijacked Lufthansa jet “Landshut” in Mogadishu after PFLP terrorists had murdered the pilot.
In 1981, Indonesian commandos eliminated Komando Jihad extremists aboard a Garuda Indonesia flight in Bangkok. The mid-1980s brought the Kuwait Airways 221 and TWA 847 episodes, in which Hezbollah-linked terrorists killed two USAID officials in Tehran and murdered U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem during a 17-day standoff.
Attacks linked to the Abu Nidal Organization in 1985 and 1986 β involving EgyptAir 648 and Pan Am 73 β left a bloody toll, including roughly 60 people killed in a botched Malta raid and 20 passengers and crew slaughtered on the tarmac in Karachi. In 1988, armed Lebanese terrorists held passengers hostage across three countries for 16 days aboard Kuwait Airways 422, leaving two dead.
From the Eiffel Tower Plot to September 11
The Daily Wire’s list moves into the 1990s with the 1994 Air France 8969 hijacking, in which Algerian GIA extremists attempted to crash a flight into the Eiffel Tower before French GIGN commandos neutralized them in Marseille. Later in the decade and at the turn of the millennium, Indian Airlines 814 and Vnukovo 2806 saw Pakistani terrorists force India to release the militant Masood Azhar in Kandahar, while Chechen rebels seized a Russian jet bound for Istanbul.
The centerpiece of the retrospective remains September 11, 2001, when nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four U.S. airliners and murdered 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania β described as the deadliest terror attack in human history.
Post-9/11 Incidents and a 2026 Cockpit Attack
Later entries include the 2007 Atlasjet 1011 hijacking, in which two Al-Qaeda-linked operatives β one Palestinian traveling on a Syrian passport and one Turk β demanded to fly to Iran before pilots grounded the plane in Antalya, allowing passengers to escape. In 2016, an Egyptian national wearing a fake suicide belt forced a Cairo-bound jet to divert to Cyprus.
The most recent item in the compilation is a 2026 Flydubai incident, which the outlet describes as a commercial flight thrown into terror when its own Omani co-pilot stabbed the pilot mid-air, triggering a plunge of roughly 14,000 feet in about one minute before the plane and its passengers were saved.
The Daily Wire presents the timeline as evidence of a sustained pattern rather than a series of isolated events, framing the history of commercial aviation as one repeatedly reshaped by political terror, hostage-taking and attacks on civilian aircraft.
Source: www.dailywire.com β https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-predominantly-muslim-nations-produced-decades-of-aviation-horror