Seriously Guys?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an interesting story this week. It detailed the experience of several Northwest Airlines passengers who didn't realize that their A320 flown 150 miles past their destination and would probably have flown a lot further if a flight attendant hadn't asked why they were behind schedule. The scariest part of the story is that the pilots were as clueless as the passengers.

Initial reports, including one from the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, speculated that the pilots might have fallen asleep. This article cites another recent incident where a Delta Airlines 767 landed on a taxiway instead of the parallel runway. The Times Online says that the 767 incident was at night after a long flight and involved a crew rushing to get a sick passenger some medical attention.

These are both pretty scary incidents. It's one thing to be slightly distracted and miss a couple radio calls or start your descent late. It's something else entirely to blast over your destination at FL370. An airliner like the NWA A320 should have started descending for the airport upwards of 100 miles out. They failed to notice radio calls from ATC and other aircraft as well as text messages with audio alerts for over an hour.

Initially the pilots denied falling asleep and claimed that they had just gotten distracted while discussing company policies. The BBC notes that as the NTSB began questioning the pilots, they admitted that they were both using personal computers...at the same time.

ABC.com noted that the aircraft in question was equipped with an older cockpit voice recorder that only stores the most recent 30 minutes of audio. That's short enough to prevent any official record of what was going on in the cockpit during the time that the pilots were oblivious to their mistake. Though I'd sure be interested to hear what was going on then, it may help the pilots that there is no record of their conversations.

I honestly feel bad for these guys. A lot of airline pilots seem over-worked and disgruntled. After the Delta-Northwest merger, the NWA pilots have more reason than ever to be mad. (They didn't get the better part of that deal...according to them.) Making a mistake like this is something that we all dread and in truth it could happen to any of us.

I don't like armchair quarterbacks and I won't do any more speculating than has already been done. As a student of Human Factors, I can think of dozens of factors that probably played into this scenario and set the pilots up for failure. All the same I have to ask, how in the world do you get so distracted that you miss repeated radio calls for over an hour and cross over your destination at cruise altitude? Even for an amateur pilot this is a monumental error.

If nothing else, these pilots will learn from their mistakes. I hope they get the opportunity to show that they did. In the meantime, let's learn from this for ourselves as well. Remember your priorities and make sure you are always flying your airplane. If you fly as a crew, make sure someone is always responsible for and taking care of flying the plane. Don't let automated systems lull you into a false sense of security. Does anyone else have any take-aways from this?

Chart via necn.com