Fly Delta-Northwest!!! Get an extra 150 miles on your trip!!!

[TheSoccerMom]

WOT is THIS on the news??!?!?!!?

An Airbus headed for Minneapolis yesterday flew past the destination airport by 150 miles, and was out of radio contact for more than 1 hour, 20 minutes??!!??!

The crew says they were having a "heated discussion about airline policy".....                 

This ought to be interesting.............   

Man, you just can't make this stuff up, can you??

 

[Mike]

Nice !!! 

And people often ask me about Chicken Wings: "where do you come up with your ideas?" and "how do you think of this stuff?"


all I really do is take notes every day......   

[Oddball]

Ok that sounds a bit like the tale of the SR-71 crew coming back from a recon mission landing at R.A.F Mildenhall, the pilot did not shut down quick enough and before they knew it they where over Norway.

[TheSoccerMom]

Anybody heard any more about this??

The only thing I've heard is that the NTSB is "looking into whether the crew was asleep". 

[Rooster Cruiser]

There is lots of conflicting information running around the news reports right now.  Hard to know the exact details, but the simple fact is they were NORDO for an hour and 18 minutes.  It doesn't matter if they were in a heated argument (yeah right!) or if they both fell asleep, the simple fact is they were not tending to their duties with 144 passengers and 3 Flight Attendents on board.   

Fox News was reporting earlier that the onboard CVR was an older model that only records the preceding 30 minutes, so there'll be no transcripts of the crew sawing logs in the cockpit.

This has been the subject of a lot of discussion in the pilot forums.  I have the permission to share one of the most insightful posts I have read regarding aviation in general, and I am submitting it for you all to read here.

Thoughts? Human factors has never had a more challenging time to attempt to ply their trade. For all the items you mentioned as well as a couple of dozen more, the interface between man, machine, and system becomes more fraught with peril. As we go forward in aviation, the old challenges of trying to keep yourself alive in the face of technology of round engines, tube radios and old-school ATC infrastructure have given way to complacency due to the luxury of reliable propulsion, unheard-of navigation precision and redundancy and inflight support from ground-based support entities. The concerns of today's pilots are focused on much different subjects than those of their predecessors, yet the other concerns of quality of life, pay, managements, etc are the same as they were 50 years ago.

What's changed? IMHO, what's changed is because of automation and technology, pilots now have the luxury (or curse) of not having to monitor a big machine whose propensity for trying to kill them was never far from front-and-center. Look at the old cockpits- there was never a moment that you weren't struck by the notion that you're in a hostile machine, flying way up in the air- where humans didn't belong naturally. Look at us today- an Airbus cockpit looks like it was styled by an Italian shoe designer (and probably was). It's down-right stylish, belying the fact that it's still a machine with the ability to fly you way up in the sky where you really don't belong, and can mash you into mincemeat at the first sign of ineptitude. If you had the chance to go inside a nuclear submarine- an underwater counterpart of a modern sophisticated airliner, you'd see a much different design philosophy. They are designed, and appointed so as to never lull the inhabitants into a mindset that they are inside anything but a mechanical contraption transporting them in an ultra-hostile environment. It's done for a reason- to keep them ever aware of their tenuous existance given what they're doing; never to become too comfortable. Our aircraft designers ESCHEWED that philosophy many years ago. I don't know that they did us any favors.

This sort of stuff has made "a day at the office" kind of like a day at the office. I don't know that it's a good thing. It certainly lays the groundwork for complacentcy. All that automation, all that ATC help, all that dispatch help through ACARS, all those chocolate sundaes and pretty girls and warm cabins where passengers watch movies and surf the Internet takes away the fact that we are hurling through air too thin to support life, too cold to survive in, and too high to step out and figure out what's going on from the side of the road.

The final verdict? Pilots, just like most everybody else in our culture have gotten lazy. Laziness begets complacency which begets trouble in the most troubling of ways- those which can't be explained-away by simple means such as, "The engine quit" or "The front fell off". Sixty or seventy years ago, the best pilots- those who were good "sticks" and were as concientious as they came, still became victims or unforgiving airplanes and situations beyond their control. Now, perfectly good, reliable airplanes- good as they come, are being betrayed by pilots who could/should know better. Isn't it time that we realized that our wealth of technology has brought out the natural tendency for humans to become "lazy"? That a factor of being human- or human factor, and they're beginning to appear at an alarmingly, more frequent pace.

For pilots, and the esteem we wish to garner from the travelling public, these incidents don't help. We've heard regulatory people point to the idea of complacentcy for decades, and now I think it's time for all of us to bring it into every cockpit and look for ways that it creeps into our operations. I'm as much to blame as anybody- I've just not had the circumstance to be "outed" yet, nor do I wish to suffer the embarrassment of that "outing"- especially if it's something that I had some control thereof.

So there's my short answer of why is this kind of thing happening.

[TheSoccerMom]

I bet plenty of lawyers are lined up................

and, they're gonna need 'em...........

 

[TheSoccerMom]

Ho ho, haaa,

the cracks on TV about this include "wondering whether all the passengers will get credit
for the extra 300 miles they flew, on their Frequent Flyer accounts"....       

Oh man...  you really can't make this stuff up........     
 
You're so right, Mike, all you and Stef have to do is take NOTES.   

 

[4X-NTY]

"Heated discussion"... the media here is telling the truth when it comes to aviation... as long as it make people think "OH MY GOD IT'S FLYING STRAIGHT TOWARDS ME" whenever they see an airplane,anyway,here they say they fell asleep,but after the incident with a greek airline,i think the name is  Helios,where there were no pressurization due to a mistake of a technician and the pilot didn't checked one of the knobs,everybody fell asleep and died,i thought they passed some law that the crew must check every few minutes that the pilots are awake.

[croatian judge]

Didn't something like this happen in India a year or two ago?

[Ragwing]

Didn't something like this happen in India a year or two ago?

Try Hawaii
Apnea, early starts blamed in Hawaii pilots' nap
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/03/sleepy.pilots.apnea/

[undatc]

CNN tonight reported that they were apparently playing on their laptops.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/26/airliner.flyby/index.html

(CNN)  -- The pilots of the commercial jetliner that last week overshot its destination by about 150 miles have said they were using their laptops and lost track of time and location, federal safety officials said Monday.

The Airbus A320 was flying at 37,000 feet over the Denver, Colorado, area at 5:56 p.m. Wednesday when it last made radio contact, the safety board said.

Northwest Flight 188 had departed San Diego en route to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport carrying 144 passengers, two pilots and three flight attendants. Northwest recently merged with Delta Air Lines.

"Using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots' command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline's flight deck policies and violations of that policy will result in termination," Delta said Monday in a statement.

Pilot Timothy B. Cheney, 53, was hired in 1985 and has more than 20,000 hours flight time; First Officer Richard I. Cole, 54, was hired in 1997 and has about 11,000 hours of flight time, the report said.

Neither pilot reported having had an accident, incident or violation, neither had any ongoing medical conditions and neither said he was tired, it said.

They each had a 19-hour layover in San Diego; neither said he had slept or argued during the flight, but both said "there was a distraction" in the cockpit, according to the report.

The pilots said there was "a concentrated period of discussion where they did not monitor the airplane or calls" from air traffic control, though both said they heard conversation on the radio, the report said.

Neither pilot said he noticed messages sent by company dispatchers, it added. It said the men were talking about the new monthly crew flight scheduling system put into place in the wake of Northwest's merger with Delta Air Lines.

"Each pilot accessed and used his personal laptop computer while they discussed the airline crew flight scheduling procedure," the report said.

"The first officer, who was more familiar with the procedure, was providing instruction to the captain."Neither pilot said he was aware of where the plane was until a flight attendant called the cockpit about five minutes before the plane was to have landed and asked their estimated time of arrival, the report said.

"The captain said, at that point, he looked at his primary flight display for an ETA and realized that they had passed" the airport, it added. After 78 minutes of radio silence, the pilots re-established radio contact with air traffic controllers, it said.

After landing at Minneapolis-St. Paul, both voluntarily underwent alcohol breath tests, which proved negative, the report said.

The safety board said its investigators interviewed the pilots separately Sunday in Minnesota for more than five hours combined. The investigation will include scrutiny of the flight and voice data recorders, it said.

An airline spokesman said Monday the company has sent the passengers on the plane $500 travel vouchers to compensate them for their inconvenience, and that the pilots have been suspended until the conclusion of the investigations.

The NTSB on Monday interviewed the three flight attendants who were on the plane, a spokesman for the Association of Flight Attendants said.

The lead flight attendant told officers she was unaware there had been an incident aboard, according to the report.

Police who met the wayward jet said the pilots were "cooperative, apologetic and appreciative."

The NTSB is hoping the plane's cockpit voice recorder either will confirm the pilot's account or provide evidence of another possible explanation, including whether the captain and first officer fell asleep.

Watch the co-pilot speak

The voice recorder is capable of recording only 30 minutes of audio, federal accident investigators said. The plane was in the air for another 45 minutes after radio contact was restored, meaning that if the recorder was working properly, anything the pilots would have said during the time they weren't answering radio calls would have been recorded over.

But a former accident investigator said the voice recorder may still provide valuable information, because the pilots could have discussed the earlier events on the way back to Minneapolis after overshooting the airport.

The flight data recorder also could prove valuable because it would have recorded actions taken by the pilots during the 78 minutes they did not respond to repeated calls from air traffic controllers, the ex-investigator said.

Meanwhile, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which scrambled fighter jets for the wayward plane but did not launch them, said it was reviewing procedures for launching the fighters to track potentially hijacked or suspicious aircraft.

At issue is the Federal Aviation Administration's apparent delay in notifying NORAD the Northwest jet was not in contact with controllers, according to a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the timeline of the incident.

Watch how the military is looking at a possible FAA delay

The official, who declined to be identified because the military and the FAA are reviewing the incident, said the FAA's request for military involvement came after the plane passed the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. NORAD scrambled fighter jets at two locations. But as they approached the runway for takeoff, the FAA reported being back in contact with the Northwest flight, and the fighters stayed on the ground.

"My real question is why we did not know of the 'radio out' situation from the FAA sooner," the official said. "The FAA is also looking into that."

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, NORAD has regularly launched fighter jets to track aircraft in unusual situations such as when they deviate from flight plans, lose radio contact or enter restricted airspace.

According to a second U.S. official, NORAD is in constant contact with the FAA so it can respond when situations arise.

[Rooster Cruiser]

I am afraid that the worst that could happen has happened to the two pilots in question.  Their certificates were revoked today by FAA   

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,569867,00.html?test=latestnews

FAA Revokes Licenses of Northwest Pilots Who Missed Airport
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 


 WASHINGTON —  Two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew 150 miles past their destination because they were focused on laptop computers instead of cockpit displays had their licenses revoked by the FAA.

The pilots of Northwest flight 188 told the National Transportation Safety Board that they were so engrossed in a complicated new crew-scheduling program on their laptops — a cockpit violation of airline policy — that they lost track of time and place for more than an hour until they were brought back to alertness by a flight attendant on an intercom.

By then, the Airbus A320 with its 144 passengers and five crew members had cruised past its Minneapolis destination and was over Wisconsin, at 37,000 feet.

The pilots — Richard Cole of Salem, Ore., the first officer, and Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Wash., the captain — denied they had fallen asleep as aviation experts have suggested, the safety board said in recounting investigators' interviews with the men over the weekend.

Instead, Cole and Cheney said they both had their laptops out while the first officer, who had more experience with scheduling, instructed the captain on monthly flight crew scheduling.

The incident last Wednesday night comes only a month after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held a meeting in Washington on distracted driving, bringing together researchers, regulators and safety advocates in response to vehicle and train accidents involving texting and cell phone use.

While the Northwest pilots were able to turn their plane around and land safely in Minneapolis, pilots and aviation safety experts said the episode is likely to cause NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration to take a hard look at the use of laptops and other personal electronic devices in the cockpit.

There are no federal rules that specifically ban pilots' use of laptops or other personal electronic devices as long as the plane is flying above 10,000 feet, said Diane Spitaliere, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman.

"I think it depends upon how it's being used," Spitaliere said.

Delta Air Lines Inc., which acquired Northwest last year, said in a statement that using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots' command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline's flight deck policies. The airline said violations of that policy will result in termination.

Several other airlines said they have similar policies. At Southwest Airlines, for example, "our pilots are not allowed to use any electronic device unless it's approved by the FAA and supplied by Southwest," said Brandy King, a spokeswoman for the airline. "That means no laptops, no cell phones, no PDAs."

The reality, said pilots, is that it goes on quite a bit during the sometimes boring cruise phase of a flight, as happened with the Northwest pilots.

"It's commonly done," said Jack Casey, a former commercial airline pilot for 34 years and now a safety consultant. Although, he said, it is unusual for both pilots to use their laptops at the same time. Typically, while one pilot flies the plane, the other pilot might use a laptop or some other device, he said.

That doesn't make it safe, Casey said, and it probably violates FAA regulations that broadly prohibit activities in the cockpit that don't relate to flying the plane.

"I would be very surprised if the FAA doesn't decide to review what's going on in the cockpit in terms of the new electronic world that we live in," Casey said. "The conversations have only just begun on this thing."

Indeed, the NTSB's release wasn't even cold when Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., called for a ban on the use of personal laptops in the cockpit.

"We don't tolerate texting while driving and we're certainly not standing for it while flying," Franken said in a statement.

A number of aviation experts have suggested it was more plausible that the pilots had fallen asleep during the San Diego-to-Minneapolis flight.

Air traffic controllers in Denver and Minneapolis repeatedly tried without success to raise the pilots by radio. Other pilots nearby tried reaching the plane on other radio frequencies. Their airline tried contacting them using a radio text message that chimes.

Authorities became so alarmed that National Guard jets were readied for takeoff at two locations and the White House Situation Room alerted senior officials, who monitored the airliner as the Airbus A320 flew across a broad swath of the mid-continent out of contact with anyone on the ground.

"It's inexcusable," former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said. "I feel sorry for the individuals involved, but this was certainly not an innocuous event — this was a significant breach of aviation safety and aviation security."

The Delta pilots union pointed out that at no time were the passengers, crew or aircraft in danger, and cautioned against a "rush to judgment."

"I strongly encourage all parties not to reach a hasty conclusion, " Capt. Lee Moak, chairman of Delta's pilots' union, said in the statement issued late Monday. "We stand firmly behind the crew's right to due process."

Delta has suspended the two pilots pending an investigation into the incident.

Cheney and Cole are both experienced pilots, according to the NTSB. Cheney, 53, was hired by Northwest in 1985 and has about 20,000 hours of flying time, about half of which was in the A320. Cole, 54, had about 11,000 hours of flight time, including 5,000 hours in the A320.

Both pilots told the board they had never had an accident, incident or violation, the board said.

The pilots acknowledged that while they were engaged in working on their laptops they weren't paying attention to radio traffic, messages from their airline or their cockpit instruments, the board said. That's contrary to one of the fundamentals of commercial piloting, which is to keep attention focused on monitoring messages from controllers and watching flight displays in the cockpit.

"It is unsettling when you see experienced pilots who were not professional in flying this flight," said Kitty Higgins, a former NTSB board member. "This is clearly a wakeup call for everybody."

The Northwest Pilots who overshot a Minnesota runway by 150 miles last week told investigators they were using their personal laptops in the cockpit, a violation of company policy, according to a National Transportation Safety Board advisory.

The two pilots, interviewed separately on Sunday, told investigators they lost track of time when they used their laptops while in a “concentrated period of discussion” about the new monthly crew flight scheduling system.

The system reportedly changed after the Northwest-Delta merger.

The pilots told NTSB officials that they had not been monitoring the airplane or calls from Air Traffic Control at that time, according to the report.

Both pilots said they heard conversation on the radio, but failed to notice messages that were sent by dispatchers. It wasn’t until a flight attendant called the pilots about five minutes before the flight was scheduled to land that they realized they had passed the airport, according to the report.

Fighters from two North American Aerospace Defense Command sites were put on alert for the plane when it was not responding to radio calls from the Federal Aviation Administration, NORAD reported.

The alert was called off once the FAA re-established communications with the pilots, according to NORAD.

Both pilots told investigators that they did not fall asleep nor have a heated argument, according to the advisory.

The Wall Street Journal reported that additional factors also may have contributed to protracted radio silence.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said investigators interviewed the pilot and co-pilot in person in Minneapolis.

The agency also interviewed the three flight attendants on Monday, Fox News has learned.

Northwest Airlines is cooperating and conducting its own internal investigation, said Chris Kelly, a spokesman for Northwest Airlines' parent company, Delta Air Lines Inc.

Air traffic controllers tried for more than an hour Wednesday night to contact the Airbus A320 Minneapolis-bound flight, which later turned around and landed safely. There were 144 passengers on the flight.

The NTSB said it will continue its investigation.

[TheSoccerMom]

Wow, what a story.   

A few comments from their letters of revocation:


The FAA did not pull its punches: "You were disengaged and impervious to the serious threat to your own safety, as well as the safety of people for whom you are responsible."

The FAA's letters make the scale of the problem even clearer: From approx 7:23 to 8:14 CDT, flight NW188 flew in both Denver and Minneapolis air traffic control without maintaining radio contact with either of them. This resulted in MSP's ATC contacting NWA and asking them to get in touch with the aircraft. From 7:32 onwards, NWA's dispatch tried to make contact eight times, but without acknowledgement.

"You operated NW188 in a reckless manner that endangered the lives and property of others," the FAA said in its letter to each of the pilots.

It ordered them to surrender their licences immediately. It orders that no application for a replacement will be entertained nor fresh certificate issued for one year.

The basis of the revocation, against which both pilots have a right of appeal, is that the regulations require "each pilot must maintain two-way radio communications with ATC whilst operating in Class A Airspce."

This failure constituted an emergency, says the FAA.

In its findings it says that there was "a total dereliction and disregard for your duties."


It looks like they'll have plenty of time to use their laptops now.....   

[G-man]

Hmmm.... Maybe I should not use MY laptop when I  fly?? Least I have an avaition chart on the screen though

[Oddball]

Wow the FAA did not hang back there!