You're making a number of judgements about the danger of the situation. The train analogy is also misleading. We're now essentially arguing about which situati

You're making a number of judgements about the danger of the situation. The train analogy is also misleading. We're now essentially arguing about which situation puts the passenger's lives at stake the most. Which is the most dangerous situation? If we absolutely have to use an analogy we should make the train and the plane situations equal. In the case of the plane no one was hurt. Nobody even knew what had happened - not even the pilots. This might be analogous to a train "hacker" placing a washing machine on the tracks...and then removing the washing machine while the train is still at a safe distance. There we go - the train "hacker" has shown that a washing machine can be placed on the tracks successfully and now the train companies can start to think of a solution. Maybe breaks. Or horns. Or those big cute scoops ;) I think if you wanted to send the hacker to rot in jail (and keep your conscience) you'd have to prove that the hacker was very reckless and had no experience with avionics systems. Something tells me he knew how to run these systems though - at least enough to hack into them.