Ethiopian Airlines copilot on a flight from Addis Ababa to Rome locked the pilot out of the ****pit after he went to use the lavatory.
The copilot was then in control of the airplane and the pilot was helpless to do anything to intervene. As it turned out, it’s a good thing he wasn’t in a position to try to wrest control of the airplane from the rogue copilot, as it all turned out well, and the copilot made a safe landing in Geneva, though the 767 was reportedly very low on fuel by then. After the terrorist attacks September 11th, 2001, the FAA mandated security changes that made ****pit doors nearly impossible for attackers to breach. Given the horrific details of the cowardly 9/11 attacks, such efforts made perfect sense. Keep the hijackers from getting to the controls and you keep them from turning the airplane into a weapon of mass destruction. But in a number of incidents, the most recent of which was the Ethiopian Airlines debacle, it has been pilots and not passengers-turned-hijackers who were the problem.