Perhaps you are being sarcastic, but I shall attempt to answer the question earnestly anyway. I've been reading up on aviation regs due to a recent interest in

Perhaps you are being sarcastic, but I shall attempt to answer the question earnestly anyway. I've been reading up on aviation regs due to a recent interest in getting a pilot's license. By my understanding, airplanes certified by the FAA as airworthy undergo some fairly heavy testing to exactly determine and prove what their capabilities and limits are. Given that getting your prototype wrong can cause the plane to crash and kill your test pilot, there's incentive to get this stuff right. Furthermore, once a plane is type certified, it can't be modified from that configuration without further testing to prove the modified configuration. Thus you'd better be damned certain that your engine control computers are correct, lest the FAA revoke the plane's airworthiness certificate, making that model unsellable, nevermind the lawsuits of the survivors of deceased passengers or insurance companies recouping their losses. Additionally, from what I've seen, most general aviation airplanes are stuck in the 60s as far as engine tech goes, in part because of the strict FAA regs. We're talking air-cooled engines with carburettors here, no engine computer to speak of, or if you're running a fancy modern engine, mechanical fuel injection. Unless you're flying a brand new Cirrus SR22 or Diamond DA20, there's no code to inspect. Even if there was, it'd be in the avionics. You don't need a nav beaon, radio, or transponder to land an airplane safely -- though they can make it much easier, and the FAA is going to want to know what happened once you're back on the ground. As far is large passenger jets? I'd say as a passenger, no, you don't have access to the code. It's not your airplane; it belongs to the carrier. Personally, if I were to own a plane and fly it, I very much would want access to any and all code that makes the plane go. Though if I'm going to be hacking on said code, I suppose that's what the FAA's Experimental category is for.