One of the worst thing that could happen in aviation is a hijacking situation but worry not, for since decades a hijacking recovery system by the name of "Home Run" has been operational.
Read the words of Andreas Bülow on this particular subject below as published in the german newspaper "Tagesspiegel" on January 13th of 2002. Mister Bülow served as secretary of state in the German Federal Ministry of Defence (1976-1980) and Minister for Research and Technology (1980-1982) :
"There is also the theory of one British flight engineer: according to this, the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots' hands, from outside. The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s, whereby they could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting [automatic pilot system]. This theory says, this technique was abused in this case..."
Not quite so much a theory as might first appear. When I released the above report about "Home Run" remote control in October 2001, I mentioned that one European flag carrier was aware of the technology, though at that precise point in time I thought it prudent not to name the actual airline:
"As long ago as the early nineties, a major European flag carrier acquired the information and was seriously alarmed that one of its own aircraft might be "rescued" by the Americans without its authority. Accordingly, this flag carrier completely stripped the American flight control computers out of its entire fleet, and replaced them with a home grown version. These aircraft are now effectively impregnable to penetration by Home Run, but that is more than can be said for the American aircraft fleet..."
The European flag carrier which completely stripped the American flight computers out of its aircraft was Lufthansa, the German national airline. Bearing in mind his former posts as Secretary of Defence and Minister of Science and Technology, Herr Bülow would have known all about this mammoth but secretive task."
Apparently the hijacking recovery system has been improved and multiple US patents were secured by Boeing since 2003:
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http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7142971
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http://www.google.com/patents/US20090105891
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http://www.google.com/patents/US20030093187