June 16

Following the infamous hijacking of commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, security searches on all forms of transportation have been extraordinarily heightened. For instance, a couple of years ago, a person was travelling by train from New York to Oregon. In Chicago, he had reserved a sleeping compartment for the long, uninteresting run from there to the beautiful state of Oregon. He boarded the train, placed his bags in his compartment, and was at once confronted by agents of both the DEA and Homeland Security. They asked him if he had any weapons or drugs, including prescription drugs. He was a heart patient and answered honestly that he had lots of drugs in his bag but that the only weapon he had was a scathing wit. After looking at the medication that he had, and not feeling particularly threatened by his weapon, they said ‘Thank you’ and went on their way. A great deal of the problem with the new security measures arises from the fact that they are so new and unfamiliar. The hijackings on September 11 weren’t the first planes to be taken over, far from it. Had the security measures been put in place years ago, no one would now feel terribly uncomfortable or inconvenienced by them. The first hijacking of a commercial airliner occurred on the 16th in 1947. The PBY Catalina seaplane Miss Macao was on a flight from Macao to Hong Kong when a passenger with a machine gun seized the cabin in an attempt to hijack the plane in order to steal the gold onboard. A crewmember startled the gunman who opened up with the machine gun. For some reason, the plane then crashed, killing 26 of the 27 onboard.