If the desired cargo in question is the Freescale employees (or at least a few of them), but if they were traveling to help with efficiency as mentioned then I would think they are less likely to have knowledge of secrets important enough to highjack a plane. This is of course assuming that they were actually doing what Freescale says they were doing.
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Originally Posted by Soundy
I think you're overestimating the "black market value" here - it's not like a car where you just swap out the VIN plate and put it back on the road. Assuming someone actually buys this plane for $50M... what are they going to do with it? Certainly not fly it anywhere - you put a jet in the air without a valid transponder, and you can probably expect to get shot down PDQ. You can't make a fake transponder code... you can't re-use one from an old plane... unless you're going to use it to fly below radar over extremely remote areas, it's not going to be of much use to anyone for anything other than scrap value, or reverse engineering.
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You might be able to spoof the code of another jet, but then of course the only use would be to fly along the flight path of said jet. And as we've learned, there are a hell of a lot of systems on that plane with communications capabilities, down to levels that only certain engineers working on the development of the plane would really be familiar with that you would have to disable. And then even to fly it below radar, apparently a 777 is terribly inefficient at that sort of thing.