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.
The pilots told me that there’s only three transponder codes that they really have to know- 7500, 7600, 7700- hijack, comm failure, and emergency respectively.
I agree that it would seem smart to differentiate ‘hijack’ a bit more from the other two.
“Makes me wonder whether the ‘confusion’ was on the receiver’s end and not the pilots.”
The error was the pilot’s, because at the ATC end they would see a hijack alert announcement along with the rest of the plane’s info, rather than the raw code.