[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.