> To protect those on the ground, part of the option could be acknowledging that the military can take out your plane if it's hijacked.

Destroying an aircraft over potentially populated areas can be useful to shift who and how many people are at risk when it hits the ground, but its not really (even if you can reliably destroy it when you need to, which -- absent a highly-reliable remote destruct device built into the plane [0], is hard to guarantee) a great way to "protect those on the ground". Because the wreckage is going to hit somewhere, and you don't really have precision control of that.

[0] which raises its own problems, of course