Two pilots have told US investigators that they were going over schedules using their laptop computers in violation of company policy while their Airbus passenger jet overflew their Minneapolis, Minnesota, destination by 240km, the National Transportation Safety Board (NSTB) said on Monday.
The Northwest Airlines pilots — Richard Cole, the first officer, and Timothy Cheney, the captain — said in interviews conducted during the weekend that they were not fatigued and did not fall asleep, the board said in a statement.
Instead, Cole and Cheney told investigators that they both had their laptops out while the first officer, who had more experience with scheduling, instructed the captain on monthly flight crew scheduling.
The pilots were out of communication with air traffic controllers and their airline for more than an hour and didn’t realize their mistake until contacted by a flight attendant, the board said.
By then, Northwest Flight 188 with its 144 passengers and five crew members was over Wisconsin, continuing to cruise at 11,100m.
Many aviation safety experts said it was more plausible that the pilots fell asleep during the cruise phase of their flight last Wednesday night than that they became so focused on a conversation that they lost awareness of their surroundings for such a lengthy period of time.
Air traffic controllers in Denver and Minneapolis repeatedly tried without success to raise the pilots of the San Diego-to-Minneapolis flight by radio. Other pilots in the vicinity tried reaching the plane on other radio frequencies. Their airline tried contacting them using a radio text message that chimes.
Authorities became so alarmed that National Guard jets were readied for takeoff at two locations and the White House Situation Room alerted senior White House officials, who monitored Northwest Flight 188 with its 144 passengers and five crew members as the Airbus A320 flew across a broad swath of the mid-continent completely out of contact with anyone on the ground.
“It’s inexcusable,” former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said. “I feel sorry for the individuals involved, but this was certainly not an innocuous event — this was a significant breach of aviation safety and aviation security.”
The Delta pilots union said that at no time were the passengers, crew or aircraft in danger, and cautioned against a “rush to judgment.”
“I strongly encourage all parties not to reach a hasty conclusion,” Captain Lee Moak, chairman of the union, said in the statement on Monday. “We stand firmly behind the crew’s right to due process.”
Delta said in a statement that using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots’ command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline’s flight deck policies.
The airline said violations of that policy will result in termination.
There are no federal rules that specifically ban pilots’ use of laptops or other personal electronic devices as long as the plane is flying above 3,000m, said Diane Spitaliere, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman.
“I think it depends upon how it’s being used,” Spitaliere said.
Delta has suspended the two pilots pending an investigation into the incident.
The FAA is also investigating and has warned Cheney and Cole that their pilot licenses could be suspended or revoked.
Pilots’ schedules are tied to their seniority, which also determines the aircraft they fly. Those at the top of the list get first choice on vacations, the best routes and the bigger planes that they get paid more for flying.
Following Delta Air Lines’ acquisition of Northwest, an arbitration panel ruled that the pilot seniority lists at the two carriers should be integrated based on pilots’ status and aircraft category.
Cheney and Cole are both experienced pilots, according to the NTSB. Cheney, 53, was hired by Northwest in 1985 and has about 20,000 hours of flying time, about half of which was in the A320.
Cole, 54, had about 11,000 hours of flight time, including 5,000 hours in the A320.
Both pilots told the board they had never had an accident, incident or violation, the board said.
The pilots acknowledged that while they were engaged in working on their laptops, they weren’t paying attention to radio traffic, messages from their airline or their cockpit instruments, the board said.
That’s contrary to one of the fundamentals of commercial piloting, which is to keep attention focused on monitoring messages from controllers and watching flight displays in the cockpit.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS