Airport security
 

(Disclaimer: SLF)

I wonder if Learmount considers e.g. US airports as safe and would ask the captain to ignore the hijacker.

There are articles like this: EXCLUSIVE: Undercover DHS Tests Find Security Failures at US Airports - ABC News

(Article from mid-2015)

Assuming the article is reasonably close to the truth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), as an SLF I'd prefer the captain to err on the side of caution, accede to the demands of the hijacker and land as quickly as practical.

The same happens all over the first world, not to mention the rest of it all, time and time again.

Airport security is largely window dressing, and only good to discourage the stupid and impressionable ones.

So yes, the crew has to make a decision based on the information at hand and weighing in all they can about passenger aircraft safety and security.

Seems they had a lot of fun with the hijacker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9w3fbdBBbA

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The YT video is bizarre. It's interesting that in the comments appended to it there's a split response. One one hand some people believe that the crew and passengers actions served (intentionally?) to reduce the tension in the situation - and thereby reduce the chance of the hijacker acting unpredictably.
Others react as I did when I initially watched it - "these people are idiots..."
But any way you view it, the compulsion to take mobile phone snaps of every situation that occurs in life has become so powerful that it even seems to over-ride the instinct for self-preservation.

Would he have been taken seriously if it had happened today. The whole thing has become as farcical as that !

It would seem that if the hijacker was in a good mood (I'm going to prove to my ex just how much I love her and will win her back!!!) then keeping things light and jovial so that he stays in a good mood would be wise. Quite possibly they were pretty sure the belt was a fake, but one way or another they had somebody on board who wasn't playing with a full deck and it was better to play along.

Just a thought: wouldn't it have been helpful for those outside the aircraft trying to solve this situation to have a picture of the hijacker and his "bomb belt"? Sent from a smartphone from inside the plane?

So maybe this was quite a smart move by this guy?

How do you know?

BBC interview - why I posed for photo with the hijacker
 

EgyptAir hijack: 'Why I posed for photograph with hijacker' - BBC News

Before I saw this, my opinion of Ben Innes was 'idiot' but after I had heard his reasons he went a long way up in my estimation.

He's had a lot of time to think about why he did it - people's post hoc explanations for why they do things are not always as accurate as they might sound. Not necessarily because they are lying - but we don't always have a great deal of insight into why we do impulsive things.