The real reason for the secrecy of confessions is much cleverer.

If you tell people they should confess their sins, and their secrets are safe with the priest, the end result is that the priest knows all the secrets of the village. Need I say more? The local priest used to be the most powerful person in the village, subtly using his knowledge to play the people and instill fear in them. Brilliant idea.

And it's obviously completely impossible to give false answers to those questions. No, never seen a doctor. No depression, nothing, perfectly fine.

That's not true. I, for example, am way above that kind of thinking.

What a wonderful idea, armed pilots in the cockpit :-(

But anyway, even with two unarmed pilots in the cockpit, one of the pilots can still crash the plane if he wants to. It won't be quite as clean as a nice long descent straight into a mountain, but if you just unexpectedly yank the controls down and to one side during approach, the other pilot probably won't have time to do anything about it. Especially on an airbus where they can fight over the controls with the override button (the last to press the override button has controls, so controls could go back and forth indefinitely, making recovery impossible).

And then there's always the crash axe or fire extinguisher. Hey, look at that plane over there... wham.

Of course this kind of action would be much more agressive and less likely to be performed by an introvert depressed person. Locking the door and starting a descent is psychologically easier than physically attacking someone or fighting over the controls. But no safety measure can ever be completely fool proof. People with power can do powerful things, not just in airplanes.

I would immediately make an announcement for everyone to fasten their seatbelts, wait 5 seconds, then create massive "turbulence". We can do -1g and +2.5g, so we can throw the hijackers against the ceiling and back onto the ground hard a few times. Then we can give the signal for the other crew members or passengers to overpower the attackers.

But in no case would we open the cockpit door. If they take over and crash the plane, everyone is dead anyway. So no matter how many people they slaughter in the cabin, that death toll can never be higher than what we'd get if we let them in.

Fast forward a few years. Depressed cabin crew member, alone with one pilot in the cockpit, hits him in the head with the crash axe which is stored behind the first officer's seat. Or with one of the fire extinguishers.

There's no winning this. If you can't trust the crew members, all bets are off.

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.