Autopilot for Crashing the Aircraft

Aircraft defections were a common occurrence of the early Cold War era (1950-65). USA and USSR used their spies and agents to get their hands on the latest military jets of each other. Defections were easily done in the aircrafts of 1950s and 1960s because there were no on-board flight control computers, no softwares and no digital autopilots (mechanical and analog electronic autopilots did exist).  These fighter jets include Mikoyan Mig-15, Mig-17, Mig-19, early Mig-21s, Sukhoi Su-7, North American F-86, Northrop F-5, Hawker Hunter etc. In these early cold war defections, the Air Force or Army high command would have liked to crash the aircraft from ground by activating a crash autopilot or a self-destruction command if such an option was available.

In the South Asia, the event of Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas (NH) of Pakistan Air Force is well-known. Official reports indicate that his instructor Flight Lieutenant Mati-Ur-Rehman was defecting to India with his T-33 trainer aircraft and that this defection failed because of the aircraft crash.

In the late 1970s, military aircraft started to become technically complex often carrying secret military technology and it must have been deemed necessary to have some control over the aircraft from the ground. Such a control should even over-ride the pilot's commands.

In the 1970s, the introduction of Fly-By-Wire (especially digital) technology was a revolution in both the civil and military aviation.  In aircrafts equipped with FBW technology, pilot (or control stick and pedals) is not linked directly to the flight controls like ailerons, rudder, elevators etc. The commands of pilots are transmitted to control surfaces via flight control computer. This is the reason that the big central control stick was replaced by a small sidestick controller.

FBW (or say computers) and datalinks enabled many functions that were previously difficult to incorporate. These include many digital autopilots (like for heading, altitude maintaining etc). To prevent defections, what was needed was a crash autopilot system, unknown to the pilot,  not included in the flight manual and known only to the high command. This crash autopilot would then be activated if the aircraft was defecting.

Does such systems exist today? It is obviously hard to answer but one can look for evidence or at least clues. In the later Cold War era (1980-90), we see that military aircraft defections were becoming very rare. This coincides well with the development of the modern avionics like Fly-By-Wire, datalinks, digital computers etc. For clues, we can also look at the business jets, the transport of VIPs.

Leaders, top executives, businessmen and millionaires travel in special aircrafts called 'business jets'.  The major business jet manufacturers include Gulfstream, Raytheon, Dassault and Cessna. These business jets have avoided installing FBW technology for a very long time. Only in the recent past did they start to install such systems (around 2005) in business jets. Dassault Falcon 7X was the first fully Fly-By-Wire equipped business jet and that too in 2005. There were clearly aprehensions about the use of FBW and the ultimate security concerns of the VIPs demanded that such systems should not be installed. Even today, the majority of business jets would be flying without FBW. For further reading,

http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/aviation-international-news/2007-07-13/fly-wire-filtering-down-bizjets