[cncrnd]

Hmm I don't think it's that much of a headache to have some PIN code provided to pilots as an additional measure.

These planes aren't cheap, even a small personal jet is in the low millions. A Boeing 747 or similar is in the hundreds of millions.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Airline engineering employees need to power on planes, fire up various systems to test, and even move them around. It's absolutely routine. All the reports I've seen seem to suggest that this was one of those employees. So it seems reasonable to assume that he would have had the PIN or "key" or whatever in this case anyway.

[Shivetya]

valet mode for aircraft. of course we can never eliminate the risk but perhaps a two key mode similar to launch controls for missiles to do anything with a plane other than low power movement?

[acct1771]

You put so much (undeserved) faith in the missile launching crowd...000000 comes to mind.

[stephengillie]

Other industries have controls that prevent simple passwords from being used. Who audits the missile control groups?

[paulie_a]

The all zero thing goes back a while when someone in the military was told to put launch codes in and defiantly made them 0. Because God forbid there should be any protection on the most deadly device ever created by man.

[donaltroddyn]

Whatever system that you put in place would have to never (or very close to never) have a false negative during normal aircraft operation.

One other commenter here mentions a simple ignition key would have prevented this incident, but there's been at least one major ignition system flaw in cars that caused multiple deaths ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... ), and the consequences of a failure causing loss of control to a passenger aircraft far outweighs that in a car.

Given the very low rate of unauthorised takeoffs of passenger aircraft, and that this case was an insider who may have been able to gain access to keys/codes anyway, is introducing introducing a new system to aircraft justified?

[h4b4n3r0]

Yeah, a freakin _ignition key_ would have made this whole thing impossible.

[Toenex]

Unless of course as an employee he had access to one.

[h4b4n3r0]

Well, require that only pilots have access to the key then.

[pjc50]

.. which they will promptly hand over to the engineers for maintenance purposes, just as people do with their car keys.

[h4b4n3r0]

Create a “valet key” which lets the engineer to do what he/she needs to do but doesn’t allow to take off.

[adrinavarro]

And mechanics.

[cookingrobot]

Or let air traffic control diasable any plane while it’s taxiing.

[Twisell]

I’m not sure having a remote control kill switch on an airplane is the kind of backdoor that improve security (if any backdoor can, which I’d doubt).

[speedplane]

The current "kill switch" technology for rouge airplanes is an F-18 with a few Sidewinders.

[bufferoverflow]

That's dangerous. Imagine this remote control gets hacked and planes start getting disabled in mid air, or even while trying to take off.

An hard to copy ignition key makes a lot more sense.