Northwest Airline Pilots Suspended for Missing Airport

Federal investigators are trying to determine what the crew of Flight 188 was doing at 37,000 feet as the airliner sped 150 miles past their Minneapolis destination and military jets scrambled to chase them.

Northwest Airlines flight 188 departed from San Diego and then flew 150 miles past Minneapolis-St. Paul, the airport where the flight was supposed to land. Air Traffic Control (ATC) was unable to establish radio contact with the flight from 5:58 p.m. MDT (6:58 p.m. CDT) to 8:14 p.m. CDT. That is one hour and 16 minutes. That's quite a long time to be out of touch with ATC. Initial reports stated that authorities wondered if if the pilots fell asleep.

According to the Federal Administration (FAA) the crew of the Northwest Airlines flight was interviewed by the FBI and airport police. The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness. The Safety Board is scheduling an interview with the crew.

Losing 'situational awareness' and not hearing repeated calls from the ATC does not sound like a safe environment for passengers. aviation safety experts and other pilots were frankly skeptical they could have become so consumed with shop talk that they forgot to land an airplane carrying 144 passengers. A very loud chime alerts the cockpit crew when the airline is trying to call them.

According to an interview on Bloomberg.com, John Nance, a retired Air Force and commercial airline pilot with 40 years of flying experience, “For this to happen, they would have had to turn down their radios so low, or even worse, took them off, and nobody was listening for an extended period of time."

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) have been secured and are being sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington, DC. However, the cockpit voice recorder may not tell the full story of what happened to the Northwest flight. New recorders retain as much as two hours of cockpit conversation and other noise, but the older model aboard Northwest's Flight 188 includes just the last 30 minutes — only the very end of Wednesday night's flight after the pilots realized their error over Wisconsin and were heading back to Minneapolis.

The pilots, both temporarily suspended, are to be interviewed by NTSB investigators next week. Delta Airlines, which owns Northwest Airlines, is also investigating the Flight 188 incident.

Cheryl Phillips
Exclusive to HULIQ.com

sources: DallasNews.com, MSNBC, Bloomberg.com