Northwest Pilots and the FAA: Snoozing? Cruising?
The Case of the Northwest Pilots keeps getting funnier and funnier. Of course, it wouldn't be one bit amusing if it had happened to me, but as Woody Allen once said, when I get a hangnail, it's tragedy; when you fall down the stairs, it's comedy. Or maybe it wasn't Woody Allen. Maybe it was Paul Allen. Or Herb. Sorry. Just thinking about those two in the cockpit doing... what was it they were doing?... makes my mind wander.
As you know, original speculation was that the pilots were taking their semi-approved staggered naps simultaneously. This made sense to me. Flying one of those big planes is almost as boring as running a business meeting. Once the thing is up in the air, you set the automatic controls, lean back and wait for it to be over. It's my estimate that fully 63% of all business people have at one time or another copped a parcel of Z's when the gears of the machine were grinding. Why shouldn't pilots? Okay, I can think of a lot of reasons why not and I'm sure you can too. But the idea that these guys slept through their wake up alarm and allowed their enormous vehicle to drift over the landing zone didn't seem far-fetched.
Yesterday I heard that the somnolence theory has now been supplanted by the story that the two were cruising the web and lost track of the time. This summons up a couple of images to my mind. I'm thinking they weren't just Googling. I'm willing to bet that if they were online, it was some kind of World of Warcraft thing. As good as YouTube or Wikipedia might be, you don't lose yourself in it the way you do when a Orc is about to hammer in your brain pan and send you back sixteen levels. There they are, 37,000 feet up, a planeful of people behind them, whacking away at their joysticks in some digital dungeon? I can buy that. In the days I was addicted to DOOM, I used to spend the entire night blasting away at hideous monsters, so in the zone that I didn't realize that the sun had risen until my wife came in to tell me it was time to go to work. So maybe that's what they were doing when they were out of touch for 78 minutes. As an explanation, it still seems pretty lame to me. Maybe one was sleeping and the other was earning experience points as a Zarkon warrior or something like that.
Anyway you slice it, though, it points to a breakdown in the system somewhere. Now it turns out it wasn't just the snoozy (boozy?) gamer/pilot dudes who are in hot water. The air traffic controllers and the FAA, which is supposed to regulate such things, were egregiously late in notifying the military of the wayward Northwest flight to Minneapolis. The information that a flight has essentially gone out of the blue and into the black is supposed to be conveyed in about 10 minutes time. It took at least 40 minutes for the news to be conveyed upward to the guys who monitor our skies. Doesn't generate a whole lot of confidence, does it?
All of this is capped off by the news that the pilot's union is unhappy with the fact that FAA has revoked the licenses of the pilots in question and is now preparing a response. I'll be interested to see it.
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Dr. Michael J. Breus: Pilot Fatigue to Blame?
If you learned upon landing that your plane's pilots had overshot the airport by 150 miles because they fell asleep at the controls, what would you feel?
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Yes, regardless of what they were doing, they weren't paying attention to the controls. What if they had run out of fuel? It's the reason for one crash of a commercial jet.
It really doesn't matter what the pilots were doing, other than they weren't doing their job.
The point of the story that virtually everyone has missed is were was NORAD? 90 minutes without radio contact and no fighter jets are scrambled? Why hasn't our commander-in-chief called for an investigation?
I fear we've become the last days of Rome, and the main-stream-media is our modern Roman circus.
I think that you are in your last days of Rome, in an extremely fast mode. Did it not take Rome about 200 years to fall and your country, only 30 years?
These references to the decline of the Roman Empire are overblown. There is nothing about ancient Rome in our modern world. Now, excuse me, I have to go prepare a sacrifice to Vulcan, the fire god.
The reality is that, regardless whether the pilots were sleeping or occupied with other, non-flight-related tasks, flying planes of this type, equipped with automated equipment, doesn't leave a lot for the crew to do, except in emergencies. This almost guarantees that crews will normally be fairly unattentive to the actual state and progress of the flight. Drowsiness/sleep is a normal response.
I am convinced that a good solution might be to accept that this phenomenon exists and work to counter it. How? Well, the flight deck systems on contemporary airliners all include multi-function displays, and are all controlled by computers.
There is no reason that one or more of these cockpit displays could not be used as normal office computers, when not in use by the crew for flight monitoring and control.
Face it. The crew generally only knows what is going on through information provided by the flight control/display systems. They could do normal office work (scheduling, answering emails, etc.), but be prompted by the flight computers whenever their attention to flight matters is warranted.
The real problem in this recent case is that the laptop computers they were using had no connections to the flight computers, and, therefore, had no way to interrupt what they were doing to tell them to tend to the flight.
If the onboard flight systems were used this way, wasted time in the cockpit would not be wasted, and the flight crews would be more alert!
You have that exactly right. I heard that the FAA's response is to prevent Pilots from bringing laptop computers on board in the future.
What a way to ignore the problem.
If boredom is the problem in the new automated cockpits, lets prevent the pilots from doing anything to solve the problem. Force them to stare at the displays until they self-hypnotize and cannot wakeup even if an alarm goes off. What the pilots did, of course, was not a good solution to the problem, but the FAA owes us all a better solution, not a non-solution.
This is a human factors engineering problem and requires a human factors engineering solution.
how many people have gotten sleepy (even they are fully rested) while driving down a straight empty highway. If that can happen to somebody actually holding a steering wheel in their hand imagine what it must be like for the pilots. Next time you take a flight try and just stare straight ahead without doing anything while the flight is at cruising altitude.
Time to recognize this reality and deal with it.
And I still say that bullit proof glass doors to the cockpit would solve the problem of what the pilots are doing and when they are doing it.
Yeah! Like the glass at a bank window!
Who were these guys trying to kid, they were copping Z’s as sure as I’m sitting here writing this.
There’s a simple solution for this, it’s called an ALARM CLOCK. It should be super annoying and could be armed to go off within, say….30 seconds of the pilots having to take control of the plane for the initial approach with the option to disarm it (so if they’re awake they could turn it off before it sounds). But I don’t see it happening because that would be acknowledging that the pilots do in fact (and perhaps more commonly than anyone would like to think) fall asleep at the wheel.
All I'm saying is that the word "cockpit" sounds a little different to me now when I hear it. What do they call that part of the plane? And why?
Yeah, we can laugh since the plane landed safely at its destination, the passengers unaware that they'd been hurtling through space at 30,000 feet with no one at the helm.
I guess in the days of Hero Pilot Capt. Sully overexposure we needed these guys for comic relief.
Exactly!
As engaging as our web surfs can be - we're still somewhat aware of our space and time.
Too thin of an excuse for 78 minutes.
One more reason to drive where I'm going.
I don't even know where to start on that one.
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