3 of the 4 jets were successfully hijacked by people who had smuggled weapons aboard.
The 4th jet was an El Al flight. Then, (as now) they put more emphases on the safety of their passengers and flights then squeezing out every cent of profit. There were intended to be 4 hijackers on that flight but El Al flagged two of them as suspicious so they didn’t make it aboard. When the two hijackers onboard made the attempt multiple armed Israeli sky marshals responded and with a lot of luck (a grenade was dropped but did not explode) the only death was one of the hijackers.
The two denied boarding on the El Al flight instead boarded a Pan Am flight, there was an attempt by El Al to warn of their suspicions about the two but it was poorly relayed and ineffective.
All three of the hijacked planes landed in the middle-east, eventually every single passenger was set free but the aircraft (and a fourth hijacked later) were destroyed.
As I read this account last night I couldn’t help but seethe with rage. WTF is wrong with “us” in ‘the west’ that what little we remember we manage to take the wrong lessons from? (The first WTC bombing comes to mind as well–anti crash-through barriers and vehicle inspection but not better evacuation training or response planing.)
We threw a couple dollars at screening and x-ray and assured ourselves that everything was fine. Did we put air marshalls on trans-Atlantic flights? No, we pretended that doing the least possible must have resolved the problem and then forgot about the incidents.
Do you think TODAY there are air marshalls on every trans-Atlantic flight? Except on El Al, I mean…
About 40 years from now I fully expect somebody to be reading an account of September 11, 2001 and slapping their head in disbelief that something fairly similar was allowed to happen yet again, killing an order of magnitude more people.
In the meantime I highly recommend Emergency, Crisis on the Flight Deck (2nd edition) written by Stanley Stewart. I’ve read a lot about airline disasters and incidents but this had many that were news to me, and it is quite powerfully written.