That's it, we should teach all cabin crew Krav Maga so they can overpower... oh, wait.

If you locked it into the IGS approach in Sion, a small Swiss airport surrounded by mountains, it would crash just fine.

(IGS works exactly like ILS, instrument landing system, only it doesn't actually lead you straight to the runway but rather to some point in the vicinity, requiring a rather long visually flown segment before landing)

Not without the pilots telling it to. An automatic approach is actually more work than a manual one. We even need periodic training to remain certified for it. And the plane won't extend flaps or landing gear by itself.

I like to think I could guide a cabin attendant to land the plane on autopilot, but I heard someone tried this once in the simulator (without the guiding pilot being able to actually see the cockpit, just a simulated radar screen) and they ended up crashing.

There are no safety features that avoid flying into terrain. Warnings, yes, ("Terrain... terrain... Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!") but the plane won't avoid terrain automatically. Not even on autopilot.

And even if such a feature existed, there would always have to be some way of turning it off. Can't have some computer bug prevent pilots from landing the plane (which would be much more likely than them intentionally flying into terrain). I've actually had GPWS warnings during landing because of a database problem. It kept yelling "pull up" even after touchdown until we slowed down to taxi speed. Imagine the plane refusing to land in such case...

Fast forward a few years. Cabin attendant takes the crash axe from behind the copilot's seat and kills him with it. (One of the fire extinguishers will do fine to knock him out, too).

Really, there's only so much you can do to prevent this kind of thing. Once flying personnel can't be trusted anymore, all bets are off.

If the attacker really started killing off passengers one by one, I know what I would do: make an announcement for everyone to immediately fasten their seatbelts, and then do some very agressive manoeuvers to throw the hijackers onto the ceiling and back onto the floor a few times in succession. I may injure some passengers and cause some damage in the cabin, but it's better than seeing them get killed. The plane can do -1g and +2.5g.

Also, they need some way of recording flight data outside of the aircraft. Ideally, some kind of network between all airplanes regardelss of company, constantly exchanging information and recording each others flight data (encrypted, of course). When an airplane crashes or disappears, there's almost always multiple other aircraft within radio reception distance even in the most remote corners of the planet. The investigators could then get the flight data from those other planes' recorders.

The beeping sound (bip bip bip bip bip...) when somebody requests access to the cockpit is quite loud, you can often hear it in the background when pilots are talking on the radio. And of course when it stops, you know someone hit the switch to either lock or unlock it the door. But yes, indeed, even much fainter sounds have been used in previous accident investigations and it's quite amazing how much information they can sometimes pick up from that.

It would probably have been a bit steeper than the 3000 feet per minute that were recorded. With continous forward pressure on the sidestick, the plane will indeed pitch down to maximum 15 degrees until it reaches the maximum operating speed (VMO). Then, even if you keep pushing the stick forward, it will pitch up to maintain a speed slightly above VMO. But this would probably be between 4000 and 6000 feet per minute or so, depending on weight.

It's more likely he just dialed in a low flight level and pulled the button for "open descent" to let the autopilot do it.

Yes you can. Just push a few buttons to disable certain flight control computers, and the system goes into alternate or even direct law. I've done barrel rolls in the simulator.

If it includes the dashes, it's probably not even a bad one!

I once tried to set a password for iCloud using 20 letters, numbers and punctuation marks. It was rejected because it didn't contain a capital letter. Sigh...

Result: iCloud passwords have lower entropy because the cracking algorithms no longer have to try passwords with only lower case letters. They can go through all the passwords with a leading capital letter in the same amount of time instead. (which is the obvious alteration 95% of users will make anyway)

To quote Richard Feynman:

I hope you’ll come along with me and you’ll have to accept it because this is the way nature works. If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully, look at it and see... that’s the way it looks. You don’t like it? Go somewhere else!

To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can’t help it, OK! If I’m going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like and I cannot make it any simpler, I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to simplify it, and I’m not going to fake it. I’m not going to tell you it’s something like a ball bearing on a spring, it isn’t. So I’m going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.

(From his famous QED lectures in which he does a remarkable job of explaining quantum mechanics to ordinary people in a way anyone can understand, it's without doubt the best primer you can possibly get, and full of humor to boot.)

Here's the youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I never understood quantum mechanics until I saw this video. Now it sort of makes sense. Of course much of it remains pretty mysterious, but the whole particle/wave duality thing? He explains it perfectly.

Feynman had an amazing gift for explaining hard scientific concepts to ordinary people without requiring maths.

I absolutely love my limiter. Not to limit myself to speed restrictions (which I don't really... errr... respect), but as a safer alternative to cruise control. Just keep your foot on the pedal and the car will keep the set speed just like when it's on cruise control. However, when there's traffic ahead, all you have to do is lift your foot to decelerate. Then, when the road is clear again, push the pedal back down and the car smoothly accelerates back to cruising speed at whatever rate you choose. If you do need to go faster, there's always the override switch under the gas pedal if you push it in hard all the way.

On classic cruise control, you're either constantly toggling the speed up and down with the lever, or switching it off and then back on again. The limiter is much more natural, no need to touch any switches or levers. As long as the road is clear, you just keep your foot resting on the accelerator which is not fatiguing since you don't have to modulate it. I can drive hundreds of km without having to touch any levers or switches, just lifting my foot every now and then.

More importantly I have found that, when using classic cruise control, you often tend to leave it on even though there are subtle reasons for slowing down. The psychological threshold for actually turning the system off or using the brakes is too high, so you often tend to keep going at the set speed rather than slowing down a little when other cars are doing something funny. On the limiter, I often find I have already instinctively lifted my foot without even realising it.

Cruise control is really the wrong way around. The car keeps a minimum speed, allowing you to go faster but not slower unless you turn it off?! I much prefer the other way around, a car that slows down if you let go of everything and won't go faster unless you override it. In Belgium, we even have signs telling people to turn off cruise control, for example when approaching road works, for precisely that reason.

Yet another advantage of the limiter is when traffic ahead of you slows down and then very gradually accelerates again to higher speeds than you intended to drive. With cruise control, you usually turn it off for traffic and then sort of blindly go with the flow on a mental autopilot. This way you may end up speeding more than you intended. The limiter will just let the car ahead pull away from you as soon as you reach your normal cruising speed, since you never had to turn off the limiter.

By the way, speed limiters, speed limit databases and speed sign recognition is hardly a new thing, many brands already have it. It may be new for Ford, but not for other brands. Some even allow you to set a certain margin above the limit, allowing you to go faster but not too much.