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The Secret Code Pilots Use When A Flight Is Being Hijacked

In case of an emergency situation where a commercial flight is hijacked, pilots have a secret code that they use to communicate with air traffic controllers. Sent silently through a transponder, pilots enter 7500 – a distress code that indicates a hijacking or illegal interruption. The exchange is called “squawking.”

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kb9522 August 17, 2017

The term squawk is not limited to this situation. A squawk is also assigned by ATC prior to departure so that they can identify each aircraft in the air. 7500 happens to be reserved for hijacking situations . There are others also... 7600 for comms failure, 7700 for general emergencies, 1200 for VFR flights. And it's definitely not a secret.

I
itsMoe August 17, 2017

Couldn't you at least have done a cursory search on the internet about squawk codes? That would've let you to the wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transponder_(aeronautics) ), and you could've provided a little background and made it look like you actually researched the topic. Even for blog standards, this is pretty bad. And the code is hardly secret, it's an international standard.