The First Hijackers summarizes the history of airplane hijacking:
[Samuel Byck] was shot in 1974 while trying to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House. As spectacular as it might have been, Byck’s plan to turn an airplane into a weapon was neither the first nor the most significant in the annals of domestic hijacking. Two years before Byck, on Jan. 29, 1972, a T.W.A. Boeing 707 bound from Los Angeles to New York was hijacked by Garrett B. Trapnell, who was shot and wounded by an F.B.I. agent after the plane landed and was sitting on the tarmac at J.F.K. Trapnell had threatened to ram the jetliner into the T.W.A. terminal unless he was provided a ransom of $306,800, won the release of the black militant Angela Davis and was granted a conversation with President Nixon. Trapnell’s subsequent trial and the measures adopted by the Nixon administration to prevent similar escapades foreshadowed much of what we have come to think of as particular to a post-9/11 world.
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By the end of 1972, more than 150 American aircraft had been successfully hijacked — by escaped convicts, fugitives and the occasional Black Panther, the majority to Cuba. Hijackings to Cuba became so routine that U.S. airliners began carrying approach plans for the Havana airport.