To be fair, the Kuwaitis probably did appreciate JB Senior kicking the Iraqis out of their country.

That's a different story. They were thoroughly confused by the contradictory warnings and indications they were getting. Overspeed and stall at the same time, stall warning that disappeared but came back when they momentarily did the right thing by pushing the nose down (making them reverse the very action that could have saved them), etc.

It's easy to see afterwards what went wrong, but a lot harder when you're actually in there and get bombarded with contradictory indications.

That's priceless. All sorts of security measures to make your life difficult, but then in the end you can get around the entire system with a simple phone call. Let me guess, you have to give your mother's maiden name?

Oh, by the way, I was talking about actual flight simulators used for training pilots, not PC simulators. I realise that may not have been 100% clear in my original post.

If there's one thing simulators can very accurately simulate, it's the programming of the computers. In fact, they often use the same computers as the airplane, or only slightly modified ones, and just feed simulated sensor data into them. If the simulator does something different than the airplane, that's a bug.

And anyway, the flight control laws are clearly explained in the training courses. So yes, you can go into alternate or even direct law, and at that point the protections are disabled and you can turn the plane upside down if you want. Any Airbus pilot knows this.

A friend of mine saw them record one of their "races" in the alps. Some big trucks arrived with supercars on them, they were carefully offloaded, they drove them up a few hundred meters, then they loaded them all back onto the trucks for the next shoot. On air, that was a neck and neck race between the three of them.

I wouldn't exactly try to do barrel rolls in the air (although this should be possible without problems), but we do have a relatively new procedure to go into alternate law in a very specific situation where the flight control computers erroneously detect a stall due to frozen angle of attack probes. In that situation, the plane pitches down uncontrollably, and the only way to override it is by turning off certain computers so you go into alternate law.

And then one day that flight attendant knocks out the copilot using the crash axe or one of the fire extinguishers.

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.