This is a really weird characterization of a normal airplane function.
First, you are seeming to act as if the power between passengers and pilots should be equal. Why would this ever be? The pilot has all the power and the passengers none. Thinking of past hijackings, it's obvious that it must be this way.
Second, the plane needs to be able to handle all sorts of 1 in a million events. Recall there were around 22 million flights in 2021, and of those, exactly 1 was involving a Boeing or Airbus jet (maybe that's even true for Embraer or Bombardier and that tier of airliner). This is because the pilot has a vast amount of controls that are required to handle various events. A plane is a pressurized tube flying thru the sky, of course controls for pressure in the cabin must exist to allow equalization under aberrant circumstances.
Finally, activating this "kill" switch would drop oxygen masks to every passenger in the plane automatically; the pilot does not have any say in this matter. While these masks obviously have limited duration, there isn't exactly a way the pilot could perform this mass murder without their own death or imprisonment being guaranteed too. Frankly, I find your representation of the purpose of the switch so immature as to be offensive.
I didn't say it was a bad idea with no legitimate purpose, just that it's pretty creepy. Given that it's only been used to commit mass murder ~once (at most), it's probably not worth implementing any mitigating controls.
If the pilots want to kill you, all they have to do is fly into the ground, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop them and nothing short of complete automation could ever remove that risk. I can't think of scenarios where the pilots would particularly want to survive after murdering all their passengers.
With https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702 when the co-pilot hijacked the plane to ask for political asylum in Switzerland, I remember news coverage reporting that he had threatened the passengers to cut off the air supply if they didn't remain seated.
This just reinforces the argument that the pilot is in control, and he can do as he likes. Fly normally, change course, kill everyone... When you step into a plane you put your life in the hands of a pilot.
It would be pretty easy to remove "kill everyone except me" as one of those options, if we thought it was worth it (which again, it probably isn't). Just mandate that an override switch for the life support systems be accessible in the passenger compartment.
> It would be pretty easy to remove "kill everyone except me" as one of those options, if we thought it was worth it (which again, it probably isn't).
The idea is to keep everyone except the pilot alive but unconscious until things improve. I think it's preferable to everyone unconscious and eventually dead.
Uh... what? Whose idea, exactly? Because that's an absolutely terrible idea. Altitude-induced hypoxia isn't like some kind of controlled medical anesthesia. If all the passengers fall unconscious from it then it's neigh certain that at least some of them are going to die. That's why commercial airplanes have emergency oxygen masks for passengers, not just the pilot.
If both passengers and the pilot aren't being supplied with enough oxygen to remain conscious 100% of the time, then something has gone horribly wrong. If the reason passengers aren't being supplied with enough oxygen to remain conscious is because the pilot cut off their air supply intentionally, then that's even worse. (Though again, thankfully that situation seems to be extremely rare.)
First, you are seeming to act as if the power between passengers and pilots should be equal. Why would this ever be? The pilot has all the power and the passengers none. Thinking of past hijackings, it's obvious that it must be this way.
Second, the plane needs to be able to handle all sorts of 1 in a million events. Recall there were around 22 million flights in 2021, and of those, exactly 1 was involving a Boeing or Airbus jet (maybe that's even true for Embraer or Bombardier and that tier of airliner). This is because the pilot has a vast amount of controls that are required to handle various events. A plane is a pressurized tube flying thru the sky, of course controls for pressure in the cabin must exist to allow equalization under aberrant circumstances.
Finally, activating this "kill" switch would drop oxygen masks to every passenger in the plane automatically; the pilot does not have any say in this matter. While these masks obviously have limited duration, there isn't exactly a way the pilot could perform this mass murder without their own death or imprisonment being guaranteed too. Frankly, I find your representation of the purpose of the switch so immature as to be offensive.