Twenty-nine years before 9/11, a New York city resident, Gustano A Pizzo, solved the how-do-you-stop-a-hijacker problem. American government officials largely ignored his solution. All except for Duane Reger and Galen Barefoot, examiners in the Patent Office, who granted Pizzo a patent for his “anti hijacking system for aircraft”.
Thanks to this, one can now build a plane designed to “foil hijackers”. The plane captures them and spits them out. The capturing and the spitting become almost child’s play, thanks to clever engineering…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.