1962: In the first successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 is dynamited over Unionville, Mo., as part of a suicide-for-insurance scam. All 45 passengers and crew are killed.

1964: Forty-four die after a man shoots the flight crew of a Pacific Air Lines turboprop over California.

1965: In another insurance swindle, a Canadian Pacific (CP Air) DC-6 crashes after a passenger ignites a mixture of acid and gunpowder, possibly in one of the plane's toilets.

1967: A BOAC Comet explodes over the Mediterranean southwest of Turkey. Although no motive was officially determined, the crime was believed to be an attempt to assassinate a Greek military leader mistakenly identified as a passenger.

1971: A man using the name DB Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient (Northwest Airlines nowadays) 727. He parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen again, dead or alive.

1972: A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet. The Ustashe, aka Croatian National Movement, admits to the bombing.

1972: Explosion aboard a Cathay Pacific jet flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong kills 81 people. A Thai police lieutenant is accused of hiding the bomb in order to murder his fiancée.

1972: In the arrivals lounge of the Lod airport near Tel Aviv, three men from the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the Palestinian PLFP, open fire with machine guns and grenades, killing 26 people and injuring 80.

1973: Eighty-one perish as an Aeroflot jet explodes over Siberia during an attempted skyjacking.

1974: A man detonates two grenades aboard an Air Vietnam 727 when the crew refuses to fly him to Hanoi.

1976: A Cubana DC-8 crashes near Barbados killing 73. An anti-Castro exile and three alleged accomplices are put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence.

1977: Both pilots of a Malaysian Airline System (today called Malaysia Airlines) 737 are shot by a skyjacker. The plane crashes into a swamp.

1985: An Air India 747 on service between Toronto and Bombay is bombed over the North Atlantic by Sikh extremists. The 329 fatalities are (and remain) history's worst single-plane act of terrorism. A second bomb, intended for another Air India 747, detonates prematurely in Tokyo before being loaded on board.

1987: A Korean Air Lines 707 disappears over the Andaman Sea en route from Baghdad to Seoul. One of two Koreans suspected of hiding a bomb commits suicide before he's arrested. His accomplice, a young woman, confesses to leaving the device -- fashioned from both plastic and liquid explosives -- in an overhead rack before disembarking during an intermediate stop. (Although condemned to death, the woman is pardoned in 1990 by the president of South Korea.)

1987: A recently fired employee, David Burke, sneaks a loaded gun past security and boards a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) regional jet on its way to San Francisco. During cruise, he gains access to the cockpit and shoots both pilots and himself, the latter after aiming the plane toward the ground in a vertical dive.

1989: In an attempt to kill police informants, members of a cocaine cartel blow up Avianca Flight 203 bound from Bogota to Cali. There are no survivors among the 110 crew and passengers.

1990: A young man claiming to have explosives strapped to his body forces his way into the cockpit of a Xiamen Airlines 737 and demands to be flown to Taiwan. Running out of fuel, the crew attempts a landing at Canton (Guangzhou), when a struggle erupts. The plane veers off the runway and collides with two stationary aircraft.

1994: Riding along as an auxiliary crewmember, Auburn Calloway, an off-duty Federal Express pilot scheduled for termination, attacks the three-man crew of a DC-10 with a speargun and hammer, nearly killing all of them. His plan, before he's finally overtaken by the battered and bloodied pilots, is to crash the huge airliner into FedEx's Memphis headquarters.

1996: An Ethiopian Air Lines 767 is skyjacked over the Indian Ocean. The jet runs out of fuel and heads for a ditching off the Comoros Islands. Skyjackers wrestle with the pilots, and the plane breaks apart upon hitting the water, killing 125.

1999: A deranged 28-year-old forces his way onto the flight deck of an All Nippon Airways 747 carrying 503 people and stabs the captain to death with an 8-inch knife.

1999: Air Botswana captain Chris Phatswe steals an otherwise empty ATR commuter plane and slams it into two parked aircraft, killing himself and destroying virtually the entire fleet of his nation's tiny airline.

2002: Fire erupts on a China Northern Airlines MD-80 flying from Beijing to Dalian. The plane crashes into the sea, killing 112 crew and passengers. Investigators blame a passenger who purchased seven separate life insurance policies just before departure.

And as I put the finishing touches on this column, news reports are trickling in about the mysterious crashes, less than 48 hours ago, of two Russian Tupolevs, speculation being that separatist operatives within that country are responsible for the downings. Also not included are the numerous airplanes diverted to and from Cuba over the years, or the assumed pilot-suicides involving EgyptAir and SilkAir.

As we see, some of the most memorable tragedies challenge our very conception of terrorism, a word whose meaning has become increasingly nebulous. Entangling every facet of airside security with only the most blatant and dramatic expectations -- the next collapsing skyscraper or nuclear-sized fireball -- is a path of substantial peril. Note also, in both lists, the preponderance of bombs, guns and hand grenades, and the comparative dearth of boxcutters, corkscrews and umbrellas. Take what you will from the data, but somewhere therein we should recognize our assorted follies. If the call is for more and greater security, so be it, but what kind? Specific threats notwithstanding, many, if not most of the events I've listed take to task the knee-jerk concepts peddled by politicians -- racial and ethnic profiling, or the confiscation of silly metal objects -- while highlighting the waste and ridiculousness of a zero-tolerance standard.

Some of the ideas bandied about in the wake of Sept. 11 would be humorous, if only people weren't taking them so seriously: sealing off cockpits from the rest of the airplane; flight deck software to prevent overflight of government buildings; airliners landable by remote control. Others advocate outfitting every last airplane with technology to thwart shoulder-fired missiles. The International Air Transport Association estimates the price tag for industry-wide missile defense at somewhere between $50 and $100 billion. A hundred billion dollars, potentially, to combat a weapon that has yet to bring down a Western plane. Neither of the two latest rocket strikes, mind you -- one against an Israeli charter flight in Kenya, another against a DHL cargo jet over Baghdad -- caused a crash or fatality.

Knock on wood, obviously. But even then, does a successful downing oblige us to install every plane on earth with extremely expensive technology that may or may not preclude disaster? Some of us say no, a voice almost certain to be unheard in the cacophony of panic should rockets strike successfully any time soon. Anathema as it sounds, the reaction to global terror should not be to batten every hatch, avenge every death and sign off on every profligate safety program. That's not to be lazy, cavalier or resigned to our own destruction. It's to be pragmatic, accepting the inevitable rare catastrophe in exchange for the preservation of our fiscal and civic sanity. Protection should be based on effectiveness and practicality, not on emotion or a relentless obsession with worst-case fantasies.

In some areas, congratulations are due. Our cockpits are fortified, our suitcases are sniffed and scanned for explosives. On the concourse, those metal detectors and X-ray machines owe more to the exploits of DB Cooper in 1971 than to marauding gangs of Arabs, real or imagined. Even with Sept. 11 punctuating the calendar, the past 15 years show a declining number of terrorist incidents. We're much safer than we were two or three decades ago. Yet thanks to one day's events and a relentless campaign of warnings and hype, we're five times as frightened.

The "new reality" of flying, post-Sept. 11, is more or less the same reality we've always had. Air travel has been, and shall remain, a high-value target for terrorists and crackpots, and the day will come, like it or not, when saboteurs again succeed. Sadly, it seems, we are cocked and ready to greet that reality not with the measured response it deserves, but with full-scale hysteria.

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