The airline pilots who overflew Minneapolis by 150 miles are now claiming that they were using their laptops and were not (as had been speculated) asleep.
According to the pilots, they were checking their schedules using their laptops.
Somehow, I don't see even the most riveting schedule could keep a pilot incommunicado for over an hour.
You have to wonder what they were really up to.
4 comments:
Only thing I wonder is when are they going to lose their licenses to pilot anything other than a bigwheel.
Exactly.
You would think they'd be in the middle of saying "I ignored radio transmissions to use my laptop for an hour" and they would be fired before they finished the sentence.
I love how they're trying to spin this as a business thing. "Sure we were using our laptops, but we were checking our schedules!"
According to the Strib the NTSB didn't take the laptops to examine them, so unless there's some ruthless follow up that will remain the official story.
I don't suppose the NTSB cares what they were doing on the laptop - (not flying the plane is not flying the plane) but the petty side of me wants to see these guys nailed on whatever the hell they were really up to.
You wonder if they can get a look at the scheduling software and see how likely they were to be "engrossed" in it.
I bet they were playing World of Warcraft networked to each other or something. That's really the only kind of online thing I can't think of that would cause a person to forget about time and everything else. Well, I can maybe think of something else, too, but I'd rather not.
My guess is that they were doing what they said. The cockpit voice recorder does not lie and NTSB was to review it. Does not matter what they were doing, they were not flying the plane or paying any attention to it. This problem is only going to grow because the pilot has become a baby sitter. Flying skills are almost certainly diminishing as a result. The idea that a pilot has 20,000 hours has become meaningless when 95% of that time is on autopilot while pilots play or sleep in the cockpit.
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