The Delta/Northwest story about the pilots overflying Minneapolis last week is in some ways a perfect distracting travel story. Nobody died, nobody was injured. A plane wasn’t even damaged. Like the “balloon boy” hoax of the previous week, it has captured the nation’s attention, and provided a distraction from larger issues such as the economy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and healthcare reform.
But that isn’t to say the whole situation doesn’t bring up some larger issues along with the levity.
For starters, does anyone really think this is the first time pilots have been using personal laptops in the cockpit?
This was a relatively short flight: not much over three hours flying time. What happens on the really long boring flights?
What was the FAA’s first clue about the laptops? When the pilots changed their Facebook status from “heading to Minneapolis” to “Oops, heading BACK to Minneapolis?
On the bright side, I guess by flying so far past Minneapolis they at least weren’t using their laptops within 10 minutes of landing.
And now that the FAA says the pilots were out of touch for 91 minutes. Aren’t we perhaps giving them just a bit too large a time window before pushing the panic button? What if it had been something more serious involving the pilots’ health, instead of just major brain cramps? How long would it have taken to start rectifying the situation?
I wonder how long it would have taken to raise an alert if the pilots couldn’t get the flight attendants’ attention?
Along with putting barricades on cockpit doors, should we consider peepholes? And if there are peepholes on the cockpit doors, why weren’t they used?
Though I haven’t worked for an airline, I have the sense that most flight attendants don’t feel comfortable disturbing pilots during flight, for a number of reasons. But maybe there should be mandatory brief “check-in” requirements with the cockpit, much as flight attendants walk through the aisles checking on passengers’ seat belts. (If any reader has experience confirming this or to the contrary, please feel free to comment.)
One thing is pretty much for sure, if laptops, Blackberries, video games, cellphones and iPods have been used regularly in the cockpit in the past, that practice has more than likely will be severely curtailed for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and one last bit of levity: The pilots may have lost their licenses. But they may be offered promotional contracts with Verizon – “Can you hear me now?”
(Photo: ajc3/flickr/creative commons)
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I was convinced these guys were asleep. But I think that them being at their laptops is even worse. They were wide awake when all this happened! Is a scheduling program that they were supposedly looking at all that engrossing to make them miss an AIRPORT?
They should grab those laptops if they were company issued and see if that is what they were really doing.
We should be lucky this didn’t happen but…why weren’t fighter planes scrambled to intercept? After 30 minutes and a plane is not reachable by multiple means (they even had other planes in the air trying to reach them) I think you need to raise the alarm.
They should lose their licenses for being easily distracted.
Yeah, yeah, but it’s not as if they missed New York or Paris. Crikey, it was Minneapolis.
Food for thought, “What if it had been something more serious involving the pilots’ health, instead of just major brain cramps?”
What if ALL personnel in the cockpit is out? Can the ground contact the flight attendants (FAs)? Do planes have “On-Star” that can unlock the door so someone else can land the aluminum tube???
Only in America.
I’m inclined to agree with the idea that the flight attendants have to have a role in ensuring that pilots remain alert. They should be required to log cockpit announcements or other actions from the cockpit, and if there hasn’t been one for a specified period (e.g. thirty minutes for a short-haul, sixty for a long haul) they should be required to speak to the pilot in charge and record that in their log. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if ATC could contact the purser independently of the cockpit if they think something is wrong – most planes seem have satellite phones for the passengers, surely there could be one for ATC to call the purser.
I have a question. Can they not verify if they were working on the laptops by listening to the cockpit voice recorder? If they were awake there would be some conversation in that 91 min. period, I would think.
Pilots using laptops in the cockpit are as bad as engineers using cellphones to text on commuter trains. Does anyone remember what happened in CA on 9/12/08? 25 people died and 135 people were injured in that Metrolink accident. Pilots should be concentrating on flying the plane. Period.