Federal investigators struggled to determine what the crew members of a Northwest Airlines jetliner were doing at 11,000m as they sped 240km past their destination and military jets readied to chase them.
Unfortunately, the cockpit voice recorder may not tell the tale.
A report released late on Friday said the pilots passed breathalyzer tests and were apologetic after Wednesday night’s odyssey.
Authorities said the pilots told them they had been having a heated discussion about airline policy. But aviation safety experts and other pilots were skeptical they could have become so consumed with shoptalk that they forgot to land an airplane carrying 144 passengers.
The most likely possibility, they said, is that the pilots simply fell asleep somewhere along their route from San Diego to Minneapolis.
One of the two pilots, first officer Richard Cole, said that wasn’t the case.
“All I’m saying is we were not asleep; we were not having a fight; there was nothing serious going on in the cockpit that would threaten the people in the back at all,” he said.
He declined to discuss what happened but insisted “it was not a serious event, from a safety issue.”
“I can’t go into it, but it was innocuous,” he said.
New recorders retain as much as two hours of cockpit conversation and other noise, but the older model aboard Northwest’s Flight 188 includes just the last 30 minutes — only the very end of Wednesday night’s flight after the pilots realized their error and were heading back to Minneapolis.
They had flown through the night with no response as air traffic controllers in two states and pilots of other planes tried to get their attention by radio, data message and cellphone. On the ground, concerned officials alerted National Guard jets to go after the airliner, though none of the military planes got off the runway.
With worries about terrorists still high, even after contact was re-established, air traffic controllers asked the crew to prove who they were by executing turns.
A report released by airport police on Friday identified Cole and the flight’s captain, Timothy Cheney. The report said the men were “cooperative, apologetic and appreciative” and volunteered to take preliminary breath tests that showed no alcohol use. The report also said the lead flight attendant told police she was unaware of any incident during the flight.
The pilots, both temporarily suspended, are to be interviewed by National Transportation Safety Board investigators.
The pilots were finally alerted to their situation when a flight attendant called on an intercom from the cabin. Two pilots flying in the vicinity were also finally able to alert the Northwest pilots using a Denver traffic control radio frequency instead of the local Minneapolis frequency.
Once on the ground, the plane was met by police and FBI agents.
Passenger, Lonnie Heidtke said he didn’t notice anything unusual before the landing except that the plane was late. The flight attendants “did say there was a delay and we’d have to orbit or something to that effect before we got back. They really didn’t say we overflew Minneapolis ... They implied it was just a business-as-usual delay,” Heidtke said.
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