Yeah, I sometimes wonder if people who weren't born yet or don't remember 9/11, or who never flew commercially before it can imagine what it used to be like. Fatalities were rare and happened in foreign countries, not on US airlines.

I found this article that shows the number of hijack incidents vs hijack-related fatalities per year since the beginning of commercial aviation, but annoyingly it doesn't break down the yearly totals and link, say, wikipedia articles etc. to the outliers.

The spike for year 2001 is probably obvious; 1996 was Ethiopian Airlines 961, 1990 was an incident I hadn't heard of involving a hijacked aircraft colliding on the runway with two others in Guangzhou, and 1985/1986 were mostly made up of EgyptAir 648, Pan Am Flight 73, and Iraqi Airways Flight 163. The 1996 one has been cited as an unheeded warning regarding intrusion into the cockpit ahead of 9/11, and the Guangzhou incident now that I'm reading its wikipedia article sounds like a real SNAFU with elements of both cockpit intrusion and losing control of the hijack/ineffective negotiation and deescalation. The Egyptair and Pan Am casualties could be lumped together glibly as either unavoidable or botched results of security forces storming the aircraft, and the Iraqi incident apparently involved the AC falling out of the sky after two grenade detonations on-board.

Anyway, a bit of a long-winded way to try to illustrate how the SOP for hijackings before 9/11 was to keep calm, cooperate with the hijackers, and try not to trigger them to use their (real or sham) weapons on the aircraft or passengers, which before 9/11 was largely effective in preventing deaths. And when hijackings did occur, they were off in distant countries, not here at home.