Flight to nowhere: Overshooting the airport

A Northwest Airlines flight to Minneapolis–St. Paul overflew its destination by 150 miles, and with the pilots unreachable by radio for 90 minutes, prompted fears of a 9/11-style hijacking.

What the hell happened up there? said The Miami Herald in an editorial. Last week, in a chilling case of “Honey, I forgot to land the plane,” a Northwest Airlines flight to Minneapolis–St. Paul somehow overflew its destination by 150 miles. For 90 terrifying minutes the plane’s pilots, Richard Cole and Timothy Cheney, were unreachable by radio, prompting fears of a 9/11-style hijacking. With fighter jets about to scramble, the cabin crew finally used an onboard intercom to reach the pilots, who would later explain that they “lost track of time and space” while having a “heated conversation over airline policy” and looking up pilot scheduling information on their laptops. I’m sorry, said James Fallows in TheAtlantic.com, but “that’s simply impossible to believe.” Cole and Cheney would be better off just admitting what everyone suspects: that they simply fell asleep.

It’s surprisingly easy to do, said pilot Peter Garrison in the Los Angeles Times. Flying a plane may involve controlling tons of metal hurtling through the sky at alarming speeds. But it also involves being strapped into a padded chair for hours at a time, hearing the soporific drone of the engines, and watching fluffy white clouds drift past. Add to that mix the “time-zone shifts and irregular schedules” that commercial pilots face, and the urge to nap can become overpowering. That’s even more true now that flying is so automated, said Elmer Smith in the Philadelphia Daily News. In the modern era, computers not only keep the plane on course and at the right altitude, they “do most of the heavy lifting during takeoff and landing.” If Cole and Cheney drifted off, they weren’t the first pilots to do so. Planes have become “too easy to fly.”

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