[steve-b]

The people on the 4th plane were compliant until they got word from the ground that they weren't the only hijack victims and what had happened to the others.

Er, you do realize that you've just destroyed your own argument, right?

The success rate against passengers who know that hijacking is no longer about clowns wanting a free ride to Cuba (but are otherwise unprepared) turns out to be, not 75%, but 0%.

[discostu]

But we don't know what's going to happen to any hijacked plane. Obviously there will be a little less compliance than there was before because we now know that there is a truly horrific possibility, but it's just a possibility. For the passengers of the 4th plane it became a certainty, they knew because of what happened to the other planes that they were going to die. When victims know they're going to die they gain a lot of courage.

In you usual crowd control criminal situation you wound one person in a way that makes a lot of blood and leaves them screaming in pain, this scares the crap out of everybody else, but by leaving the victim alive it also plants a seed of hope. Again this is seen in 9-11, as long as the passengers had the seed of hope they did nothing, it wasn't until they knew they were going to die that they decided to die like heros. As long as hijackers leave that seed of hope in their victims you're unlikely to see major resistance. Because of the new possibilities you'll see more resistance than you used to, but it won't be anywhere near universal, civilized man just isn't cut out for that kind of stuff.