George & Terrorists

[wildbill3]

Several years back, I was flying a Delta MD80 and next to me was a Delta pilot, who deep into a fascinating conversation, told me about an automed landing system called George. As I remember it, the pilot was telling me that George was going to land the plane today.

My question deals with a severe situation when the Air Marshal isn't present or that passengers must exercise control of the plane and worse comes to worst. Can anyone or at least a private pilot land the plane if someone communicated how to set George into action?

I heard someone from FAA or NTSB mention that in the long range planning there was thinking about making planes controllable via remote systems. Was this person talking about accessing George via some wireless signal?

Please understand that the questions are defensive should the situation ever arise. I'm not interested in replacing any pilots with technology. I am interested in knowing what's the likelyhood of a plane landing without a professional pilot at the controls.
God forbid this should ever occur again.

I have over a million miles on Delta and a bunch everywhere else. In these years I thought about many emergency scenarios and how to respond, but never one where there weren't pilots or that terrorists were on a suicide mission.

Thanks for getting me here to there and home many times.
[email protected]

[Code Blue]

I stand - or rather sit - to be corrected on the origin of the name, but since I was a lad, "George" has been a name for the autopilot.

There have been a variety of threads on the use of autopilots in hijack situations - if you can get the search function to work, you may get more info.
Rgds
CB