Well I was wondering on light aircraft or large aircraft like Airbus or Boring if someone could go to an empty plane start it up and take off or whether there is a code to be input or a key of some sort or if anyone has ever stolen a plane and taken off somewhere?
Sure it’s happened - even recently.
The hard part is starting it up. I’m a professional pilot and if you put me in a jet I was not familiar with it’s perhaps even money on whether I could start the engines. Every manufacturer does things differently, and depending on the vintage there may be multiple steps that have to be followed with some precision. Not caring if you over-temp them and such would work in your favor, but it would still be iffy.
I won’t go into specifics about security measures, but there are also a lot of ways one could be caught and stopped.
I don’t believe there are keys or codes to get it started. I’d imagine someone with knowledge of how to start and fly a plane could steal one right off a runway. However, if the plane doesn’t have an APU, you’ll likely need a start cart to get the engines running. In that case, you’ll need the help of someone on the ground.
I don’t think they were repoing Airbuses on that show.
I think someone repo’ed their server too!
On the lighter side of aviation…
While many small, single-engine airplanes have keys not too dissimilar from car keys some general aviation planes do not - they might have a push-button start. Some may need handproppring. I’ve flown a few that have pull-starts sort of like lawnmowers (those are typically kit planes or ultralights).
It is also possible to hot wire a small airplane. At one point in the early 00’s someone attempted to do just that at the small airport I flew out of. I am not going to go into details here but anyone who paid attention in ground school could probably figure out how to do that in a small piston-engine airplane.
Relevant Straight Dope column:
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/948/do-you-need-a-key-to-start-an-f-16/
James Garner managed it in The Great Escape.
If you try to hijack a plane from the Portland airport you’ll be in for a nasty surprise–the Air National Guard has a post right next to the main airport and they can scramble fighter jets out of there in a matter of minutes. They’ll shoot your ass down, too, if you don’t take that plane right back where it belongs. Heck, same for trying it at Sea-Tac, they scramble there too and did not too long ago when a disgruntled Horizon employee stole a turboprop plane and if he hadn’t crashed it they’d have likely shot him down if he didn’t comply and land it post haste. Proof in pics–they were loaded for bear.
This thief made a habit of stealing smaller planes when he felt like it
I feel like this thread has devolved a bit from the original question.
The real questions are:
a. Is there really no lockout or passcode or other security mechanism even on a jet that costs hundreds of millions of dollars?
b. If someone did steal a 737 or something, and they somehow escaped and were not shot down or tracked (completely plausible if they stole it from an airport in Africa or something), what could they actually do with it?
Stolen cars someone can swap the plates on, maybe replace the VIN plate that is visible from the outside with one that isn’t marked as stolen, and drive it for years. Yes, eventually a cop will pull them over, run the plates, notice they don’t match the name of the driver or their ID, and they are busted - but it could be several years before that happens. And in the early 90s and before, police didn’t all have computers in their cars and an easy way to check these records (they might be able to call in to dispatch), so crooks driving stolen cars probably got away with it more.
Or strip the car for parts and sell them as salvage.
How could someone profit from a stolen airplane? I’m guessing the answer is that licensed aircraft mechanics can’t and won’t use salvage parts of questionable provenance. So the jet can’t be stripped for parts. And each landing, the jet’s registration is being checked against various records, so a jet in passenger or cargo service is sort of like a car being pulled over by the police every time they go anywhere.
I think you are incorrect on the timing. The Sea-Tac Horizon incident lasted over three hours.
IIRC from the old Airplane Repo, especially some smaller planes were indeed cannibalized for parts, and sometimes a plane was used to smuggle drugs a few times and eventually abandoned.
Heavy jet aircraft will likely not have keys, and as for the smaller planes with door and ignition locks, well, if you’re going to jack a jet, why shy away from a little picking and hot-wiring?
This was decidedly not true in the 1990’s when I worked as an air traffic controller. We would have sheets circulating of reported stolen planes and technically were expected to recognize when one was stolen but no one really figured you would remember most of them.
No, we caught a stolen jet. it was a Citation. Did we use any fancy registration checking? Nope?
We were a small training airport with lots and lots of traffic but very few jets. We liked working jets. We remembered them. So it just so happens that we had two citations arriving at our airport on the same day!
We parked them side by side then realized "Hey, both planes have the exact same call sign. Turns out plane 2 was stolen and the callsign changed. Bad luck parking right next to the plane you stole the call sign from.
All of this, of course as pre 911 but I’d doubt this has changed to include every airport that services cargo jets. We were a VFR airport so there was no way we could check the status of the registration and most of the stops were for fuel and there’s no way the fuel guys had the time to do it either. Under VFR rules the pilots were not required to fill in any flight plans or anything like that. They weren’t that tightly scrutinized.
Back about 1965-67 or so I helped my older sister repo a Cessna 210, it was a real early one, still had wing struts. The real owner was with us, the crook as in the airport lunch room and the plane was in a nearby hanger. There was a pretty long taxiway straight out from the hanger. I eased the hanger doors open with the owner and then Sis & I got in knowing there was no time for a engine warm up or mag check, etc… We were going to be heard. The owner checked for traffic, it was an uncontrolled airport, signaled he saw no air traffic, she had never flown a 210 but it started like all Cessna singles and we just smoothly pushed to full power as we went through the doors and with some flaps deployed took off straight out the taxiway.
The light wind was about 60° off to the right and not really a factor. The guy who had the airplane still almost got to us before we out ran him and got off the ground. It took her a few minutes to figure out the gear retraction lever as it was not just a simple push up. It had to be moved to the side also. Had about an hour flight to get it back where it belonged and we were reading the pilot handbook and playing with the plane as bit on the way.
We had only about an hour notice we were going to do this and no hand book around but it was a single Cessna, so it was really no deal to do unlike a jet or bigger twin of that time.
She had a lot of ratings but I was just a Pvt. Pilot at that time.
Fun stuff back in the day for young folks.