An airline pilot friend sent me a song: “Tweetin’ on a Jet Plane”.
This may not be an accurate summary of the recent airline flight that failed to respond to ATC and overshot Minneapolis. Northwest Airlines does not offer in-flight Internet access on their Airbus A320s (source). Thus if the pilots were indeed working on their laptops it would have to have been using a desktop application such as Microsoft Office. Various politicians are calling for banning electronic devices in the cockpit, on the theory that every safety problem can be fixed with an additional regulation. I have personally observed airline captains using smartphones while parked on a taxiway waiting out air traffic control/weather delays. They did this to check weather, contact Dispatch, and do other flight-related tasks. A ban on the use of such devices would have simply inconvenienced passengers further and would not have improved safety (we were stopped with the parking brake set, an all too common situation at JFK). Once in the air, cell phones tend not to work, especially T-Mobile (I have tried it from helicopters and light airplanes, while someone else was on the controls).
No politician seems to be willing to consider the idea that the two pilots simply fell asleep, something that has happened numerous times before to airline crews, and then made up a story that they thought would sound better. In a jet one usually has to respond to a radio call at least every 5 or 10 minutes, if only to switch from one controller to another (each controller handles a specific block of airspace and at 500 miles per hour one tends to go through those blocks pretty quickly). It would be very strange for an awake pilot, even one distracted by a computer, not to notice the lack of radio exchange.
Why make up a story that does not preserve a chance of keeping their jobs? (“The damn FMS and comm just froze up and we couldn’t regain control of it”. This might survive a they-said he-said “can’t be reproduced on the ground” but they were probably saturated with training and experience that wouldn’t let them lie about the airplane.)
Dozing might even be more excusable than conscious prohibited activity – at least dozing is no longer an unspeakable act.
I’ll take Occam’s Razor – they were probably distracted a few minutes looking at the client or offline tutorials for the scheduling app, heard the ATC comm at some point and squirmed for several more minutes unsuccessfully trying to devise a plausible story before responding. They knew their fuel state and visibility to ATC and thus no real danger in extending the blackout.
Why make up a story? Because anything sounds better than falling asleep on the job. Which is what I believe they did.
We’ve all been taught how much safer flying is than driving. But that’s with awake pilots …
Hard to believe it was anything other than sleeping. But wouldn’t the cockpit voice recorder sort the issue out? Silence/snoring = sleeping. Has the recording been made public?
Greg: The CVR records in a 30-minute loop. So you have only 30 minutes prior to the time that the airplane was shut down at the gate. Given that the airplane was immediately boarded by police, the shut-down might have been significantly delayed.
Very few pairs of people can sustain a lie through separate professional interrogation. philg is of course right about the 30 minute window on the CVR – press reports were ATC vectored them around for some time to verify they were under proper control on board. This alone was enough to record over the blackout period. One or both pilots will or have already come clean, sleeping or not. Their airline career is over and there’s no upside to being forever a liar on top of grossly incompetent.