My thoughts and prayers go out to all affected by this senseless tragedy. Hopefully people will retain their wits during this emotional time and a new cycle of violence will not be spawned by this barberism.

Clearly the conventional wisdom prior to these hijacking was to cooperate and let the professionals deal with the hijackers (hopefully they would land somewhere at some point) and in most cases this would have given the hostages the best chance at survival. With these attacks a new type of hijack (at least as far as I can remember) has been throw in to the equation, the hijack that is not taking hostages to get demands met or a plane to seek asylum somewhere but a hijack where the passengers are irrelvant to the hijacker and the plane is to be used as a crude bomb. Clearly if one knows that the hijacker is one of the later the obnvious thing to do would be to fight like hell. The only problem is that the hijackers are pretty unlikely to tell people what they are up to and indeed would probably tell people that they were not going to get hurt jsut so that they wouldn't have people attacking them. The prisoners dilemma basically.