“You really don’t smell something fishy?”
I asked my Jet Blue pilot pals about it when it first made the news. Both of them, independently, said essentially the same thing, that it would be some (dummy) punching in the wrong code because “radio” and “hijack” are similar codes and the pilot either wasn’t paying close attention to what he was entering or he remembered wrong. I asked one of them again this morning and he still thinks that is all that it was.
Once the pilot transmitted the hijack code the airport security was going to go through their hijack protocol no matter what the pilot tried doing to cancel it. Embarrassing for the pilot, scary for the passengers.
“Also, it seems if it was a an inadvertent button pushing error, why wouldn’t the passengers reboard the same plane?”
The plane had a real mechanical malfunction, the radio didn’t work. They won’t reboard passengers on a plane with a mechanical issue, they find other seats for them. Another plane if one is available, or on other flights.
Hard to understand why the code for hijacking in progress isn’t something easy to remember (like 9999) and hard to confuse with anything else.
Makes me wonder whether the ‘confusion’ was on the receiver’s end and not the pilots.