The 1974 Patent That Would Drop Hijackers Out of the Plane by Parachute
In the early 1970s, aircraft hijackings were alarmingly common. Gustano A. Pizzo had a mechanical solution. His US Patent No. 3,811,643, "Anti hijacking system for aircraft", was filed on 2 November 1972 and granted on 21 May 1974.
How it works
According to the patent's abstract, a partition stored in the aircraft's belly can be raised just behind the cockpit to divide the area into two zones, port and starboard. Once a hijacker is sealed into one zone, its floor, made of hinged sections, drops away on command. The hijacker falls into a capsule in the belly of the plane. The capsule is then released through bomb-bay doors and descends to the ground under its own parachute.
The patent has a single, long claim that sets out the whole arrangement: the partition, the hinged deck sections, a capsule and a bomb-bay door under each zone, and controls for operating them.
The prize
In 2013 Pizzo was posthumously awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Safety Engineering. The organisers described the invention as a system that "drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth".
Today, aviation security relies on screening and reinforced cockpit doors rather than trapdoors in the floor. The patent remains one of the best-known examples of an invention that is technically detailed but wildly impractical.
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