And how exactly would the hijackers have broken into the cockpit?
That is fully funny.
Would not want to be in the situation with only a set of contraband tweezers though…
Good point. That hadn’t occurred to me. :smack:
Forget breaking into the cockpit, apparently it is tough just to get in and out of an aircraft’s bathroom, as this flight found out when the pilot got trapped. I’m guessing the cockpit pucker factor went fairly high for a few minutes as a guy with a “thick foreign accent” tried to get the copilot’s attention.
It’s always possible they extorted their way in (Open the door or we start killing passengers…) or that they bum-rushed the cockpit door when the pilot came out to use the bathroom.
We are specifically trained not to open the door, no matter what. Period. And difficult though it may be, I believe myself to be capable of following that policy. The death of everyone on board is preferable to my allowing the aircraft to be taken over and potentially killing more people.
As to the second point, we have a procedure to follow for those sorts of movements that make it unlikely for an assault on the cockpit to be successful. The door is only opened briefly, there is always someone between the door and the cabin during the transfer, and we don’t do it until all passengers are seated and the crew has been identified through the peephole.
This tactic, in theory, shouldn’t work after 9/11.
If hijackers access the cockpit, the assumption has to be that everyone (say, 200 people on board) will die, so why open the doors because they threaten to slit the throats of five or a dozen passengers.
I wonder if it would be safer to give certain members of the cabin crew a code to open the door that only unlocks it after, say two minutes. If at any point during those two minutes one of the pilots denies access (by pushing a button) the door won’t open. If there are no pilots capable of pressing the button within two minutes, someone can at least get in there and draw on their faces, or something.
It’s also exactly the same problem that already exists. Hijackers could say “open the door or we start killing passengers” to the pilots.
This may not sound like a serious question, but it is. If the pilots are incapacitated you might as well leave yourself one option, even if it’s not a great one.
Can your carry-on bag be a fully functional parachute?
Sure, that would be safer. Before you get out your wallet, you’ll want to do the math to see whether this is a good investment: if you spend 5 billion dollars in R&D, certification, production, maintenance and repair, and training, but only end up saving one planeload of people sometime in the next three decades, it’s probably not worthwhile.
Ever since 9/11, I doubt all of the passengers will surrender themselves to wholesale slaughter; the bad guys might mortally wound a few, but before long there will be twenty passengers crushing/beating them to death. Moreover, if the bad guys get into the cockpit, they’ll use the plane to inflict potentailly far more massive damage on the ground, so even if the deaths of all passengers is the outcome of keeping the cockpit door locked, that’s better than what happens if the pilots surrender the cockpit.
Sure - but there’s no way for you to exit the plane.
How is “open the cockpit door or we start killing passengers” going to work? If terrorists take control of the plane, everyone on the plane dies. If terrorists start killing passengers one by one eventually the passengers attack them en masse. In no case can a pilot save lives by opening the door and surrendering the plane to the terrorists.
Exactly. All it changes is the method of death. The passengers would have had their throats slit as opposed to death by high-speed impact.
You could probably carry one onboard, but it would look extremely suspicious after D.B. Cooper’s hijacking and then parachuting with $200,000 in 1971.
And the doors can’t be opened mid-flight.
Idea:
Could an autopilot modification be made that, after the airplane has flown for a certain amount of time with no human input whatsoever, ask the pilots, “Are you still there?” and the pilots could put in some meaningless input - say, adjust the A/C or a screen’s dimness - to say “Yes.” It would be like a screensaver; if you don’t make any input for X amount of minutes, the screensaver kicks in.
If the pilots don’t respond, then the autopilot will ask again and again - once every 60 seconds - until there is a response. If after, say, 10 such inquiries there still is no response, then the autopilot will assume that the pilots are dead, locked out of the cockpit, or incapacitated, and automatically begin landing the airplane at the nearest major airport.
Of course, if the pilots begin putting in inputs at that point, this autopilot function will immediately go away and let the pilots take over again.
Same problem of ‘cost to make & maintain’ VS ‘saving X number of lives SOMEDAY.’
Sometimes, saving even 10,000 lives is too costly in the overall cost of doing so. Sometimes you just have degrees of ‘bad’ to chose from. And those are subjective so there will always be unhappiness for some. 
As I mentioned, if things start going downhill in the cabin, the pilots can make the ride very bumpy. Very difficult to hold and threaten while the plane is doing maneuvers that will cause anything not tied down or buckled in to bounce between the ceiling and floor over and over. It’s certainly not easy or safe to hold onto a knife while being dribbled by pilot maneuvers. Meanwhile, they head for the nearest landing and alert the SWAT team.
Another possibility (can they do this?) is to kill the cabin pressurization and let everyone pass out. As I recall, the pilots have an hour or so of bottled oxygen while the Miss Piggy masks for the passengers are good for 10 to 15 minutes; and the hijackers would have to stay tethered to their seat masks during this time.
But yes, there is no upside in opening the door no matter what is happening in the cabin, since the likelihood now is that it means death regardless and possibly mass murder of 3,000 others… plus, the local USAF squadron would have no hesitation shooting down the airliner if it is controlled by hijackers and headed the wrong direction.
I’m sure there’s no technical reason this couldn’t be done, though it would involve a significant redesign of some aircraft systems. Any landing, including an autoland, normally requires significant input from the pilots. The landing gear and flaps can’t be selected by the autopilot for example. Also progressively lower altitudes must be entered into the autopilot mode control panel (MCP) by the pilots as they are cleared by ATC. That last one is a significant safety feature, whenever the aircraft is descending it must be descending to something, either a cleared or minimum altitude of some sort prior to the final descent on the ILS. This is important from both a terrain clearance perspective and traffic separation
The autopilot would need some way of accessing and interpreting the weather conditions at the arrival airfield and nominating an appropriate runway to use.
Not all runways have an ILS, and without an ILS you can’t do an autoland.
Aside from the technical issues, I think it is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. The chances of both pilots becoming incapacitated are tiny. There are rules that help prevent it from occurring (e.g., different meals eaten at different times and pilots with heart conditions can’t fly together).
I’m not aware of any times this has happened. We still need to be focussing on preventing accidents caused by flying serviceable aeroplanes into hills and losing control of serviceable aeroplanes. Those are the big risks to aviation safety at present.
You could do this. You’d really want some way of ensuring that everyone else was seated and strapped in before you did it, otherwise, although it may not be logical, you may find it hard to accept that you seriously injured people as well as the hijackers. There is also the issue that you need to settle the ride down at some point in order to descend and land. You need to have totally incapacitated the hijackers.
We can certainly do this though you have a similar problem to the above in that you need to get down to land and then everyone, including the hijackers, regains consciousness unless you were so extreme with the depressurisation (high enough for long enough) that you actually killed people.
The assumption made is that because 9/11 happened, “normal” hijackings are no longer a thing. I think that if a hijacker could convince the pilots that it was a normal hijacking rather than a suicide mission then they might let them in rather than listen to their crew being murdered. They shouldn’t let them in, and we’re trained not to, but it’s a possibility.
People seems very confident it would happen (passengers actively resisting when threatened). I’m not so sure, one instance doesn’t make a rule, and the rule is, for some reason, that people let themselves be murdered rather than fighting back. It’s puzzling, but it’s what’s typically happening in most instances of mass murder.
On some commercial aircraft (many Boeings, for example) there is a keypad next to the flight deck door. The keypad allows the cabin crew to request access to the flight deck. Generaly, the codes are not changed for each flight, rather on a month-by-month basis.
Simply entering the code does not open the lock on the flight deck door. Once the proper code has been entered, the pilots are notified via a chime that someone is requesting access to the flight deck. Once the chime sounds, they have a set time to allow or deny the request. This is usually done with a switch which has ‘ALLOW’ and ‘DENY’ selections.
If no action is taken by the pilot, another set of chimes activates prior to the door automatically unlocking. This allows access to the flight deck if both pilots become incapacitated. For instance, if they both had fish for lunch 
Generally, the pilots will have been advised by the cabin crew they would like to come up, so when a correct code has been entered, it is not a suprise to the pilots.
Suprising pilots is generally not a good idea, since many are FFDOs (armed).
Source(s):
Former Airline Pilot