Pilots should have had warning of airport approach

[October 23, 2009]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The two Northwest Airlines pilots should have had numerous warnings that their flight was nearing its destination in Minneapolis. Controllers were trying to reach the plane by radio.

When that didn't work, normal procedure would be to have the airline's dispatcher also try to raise the plane using a phone-like device that chimes.

The Airbus A320's brightly lit cockpit flight displays should have shown the pilots that it was time to start descending to land.

Instead, the plane, en route from San Diego with 144 passengers and a crew of five, passed over Minneapolis at 37,000 feet just before 9 p.m. EDT Wednesday. Contact with controllers wasn't established until 14 minutes later, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident. By that time, the plane was over Eau Claire, Wis., more than 100 miles beyond Minneapolis.

Even that should have been a clue. One of the things most pilots are attuned to when flying, even above 30,000 feet, are city lights. The bright lights of Minneapolis should have alerted the pilots that they were over their destination, just as the dimmer lights of Eau Claire should have warned them they were in the wrong place, experts said.

Yet, the pilots didn't discover their mistake until a flight attendant in the cabin contacted them over the intercom, said a source close to the investigation who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified. The pilots had lost communications with air traffic controllers for over an hour and had overflown their destination by 150 miles. The plane turned around, landed safely and no one was injured.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the pilots, whose identities have not been released, told authorities they had become distracted by a conversation about airline policy and lost track of their location. Federal officials are investigating whether pilot fatigue also may have played a role.

"It just doesn't make any sense," said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. "The pilots are saying they were involved in a heated conversation. Well, that was a very long conversation."

As of Thursday, NTSB investigators had not yet examined the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which were being sent to Washington for analysis.

Ben Berman, an airline pilot and former chief of major accident investigations at the NTSB, said it becomes second nature for pilots to know when they need to begin landing preparations.

Those preparation should have begun when the flight was still 100 miles or more away from Minneapolis, he said. It would require a fairly dramatic event to lose track of that kind of awareness, he said.

Shop talk "pretty clearly wasn't all that was going on," Berman said.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Thursday investigators hadn't yet questioned the pilots and didn't know whether it was possible they had fallen asleep.

The two pilots have been suspended from flying while Delta Air Lines Inc. conducts an internal investigation, said Anthony Black, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline, which acquired Northwest last year. He refused to name them or give further details on their background or what happened in the air.

The FAA is updating decades-old rules governing how many hours commercial pilots may fly and remain on duty. The NTSB also cautioned government agencies this week about the risks of sleep apnea contributing to transportation accidents.

In January 2008, two go! airlines pilots fell asleep for at least 18 minutes during a midmorning flight from Honolulu to Hilo, Hawaii. The plane passed its destination and was heading out over open ocean before controllers raised the pilots. The captain was later diagnosed with sleep apnea.

Air traffic controllers in Denver had been in contact with the Northwest pilots as they flew over the Rockies, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said. But as the plane got closer to Minneapolis, she said, "the Denver center tried to contact the flight but couldn't get anyone." That was just before 8 p.m.

Denver controllers notified their counterparts in Minneapolis, who also tried to reach the crew without success, Brown said.

The FAA had notified the military, which put Air National Guard fighter jets on alert at two locations. As many as four planes could have been scrambled, but none took to the air.

The incident is likely to renew questions about pilot professionalism that surfaced after the crash of Continental Express Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y., on Feb. 12. Low pay, training and work schedules at regional airlines were some of the issues raised in connection with that accident. The flight was operated for Continental by regional carrier Colgan Air Inc. of Manassas, Va.

The accident generated concern in Congress and the Obama administration that regional airline pilots aren't as qualified or experienced as pilots at major airlines, although some pilots' unions have warned that standards have been slipping industrywide.

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On the Net:

FlightAware.com tracking of Northwest Flight 188: http://bit.ly/2QV9hX

National Transportation Safety Board http://www.ntsb.gov/

[Associated Press; By JOAN LOWY]

AP Airlines Writer Joshua Freed and AP writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

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