Flight to nowhere: Overshooting the airport

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.”

Automation has nothing to do with it, said pilot Patrick Smith in Salon.com. As someone who regularly makes tedious, long-haul flights, I can tell you “that if I had to have my hands on the wheel that whole time, I’d be twice as bored and 10 times as exhausted.” In this case it’s more likely that Cole and Cheney, rather than falling asleep, simply had their radios tuned to the wrong frequency, or had turned the volume down so they could talk and forgot to turn it back up. Maybe, said John Kelso in the The Austin American-Statesman, but surely there’s an even simpler explanation of the pilots’ reluctance to land. “Have you ever been to Minnesota?”

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