Restricted Airspace, Rented Plane, Hijack Code
A bad day all around:
A pilot flying from an Ottawa airport last Wednesday in a rented Cessna 172M inadvertently set his transponder to broadcast the hijack code and then inadvertently flew into restricted airspace…
via AVweb.
If this would have happened in our country, five surrounding states would have been completely evacuated, missiles would have launched against Russia, China and Iran, and he would have been shot down 20 minutes after he overflew the capitol and was on the ground.
In Canada they have the common sense to know that mistakes happen when someone is under stress and that a 172 isn’t going to cause the apocalypse.
So, apparently the rental pilot in question experienced an alternator failure, and stopped on 7500 on his way to 7700 on the transponder.
Still no info on what the airspace violation bit is about, though. I suspect it may be a bit of a red herring… Perhaps he was over downtown Ottawa, near the restricted airspace and it got misreported? Who knows?