Pentagon scrambles fighter jets as pilots overshoot destination by 150 miles. Asleep in the cockpit?

The 9/11 terrorist attacks involved jet airlines, transcontinental flights, and a lot of innocent passengers.

So when air traffic controllers lost contact Wednesday evening with a Northwest Airlines plane jetting from San Diego to Minneapolis, they feared a hijacking and contacted the Pentagon.

Later the two pilots said they were out of contact for 78 minutes -- overshooting their destination by 150 miles before calling the tower -- because they were having a "heated argument" about airline policy and "lost situational awareness."

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into the possibility that maybe they were asleep at the wheel. With the flight recorder now in Washington, investigators should know soon.

Two aspects of the story seem especially interesting.

One is that it was a flight attendant who apparently saved the day by finally alerting the pilots on an intercom. After that, with the plane already in Eau Claire, Wis., the pilots sought permission to turn back. They landed in Minneapolis about an hour after the scheduled arrival time.

But the second truly alarming feature is how close the 147 passengers and crew on board came to disaster. According to several reports, the National Guard was scrambling four fighter jets from two bases to intercept the plane. Because the pilots finally resumed contact with the tower, the jets never made it to the air.

But passengers were shaken later when they learned how close they had come to peril.

"When you hear that fighter jets were ready to scramble, that just gets you really mad," passenger Scott Kennedy told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

-- Johanna Neuman

Credit: File photo of a plane in Detroit by John Gress / Reuters

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Comments

[Brent in New Hampshire]

They're seasoned pilots, so they didn't make a mistake typical of junior pilots. They weren't asleep. Makes NO sense that they were arguing. This was a lengthy period when they were incommunicado by radio. I won't be surprised if it comes out that they're gay and were getting to know one another better.

[gwb]

An average airliner travels at an average speed of 350 mph over 10,000 ft, and can traverse 150 miles in a little over a half an hours time.....the pilots were distracted momentarily, nothing more sounds much more plausible than falling asleep.

end of story.

[Brent in New Hampshire]

gwb writes that they were "momentarily distracted." Gwb hasn't been reading the story. The pilots did not respond to eight attempts from ground control to reach them, both by radio and by e-mail, and were out of contact with the ground "for 75 minutes." They claim they were arguing about airport policy. Right.

[Arthur Dent]

Saying that the passengers "came close to disaster" and were in "peril" is a gross exaggeration of the facts. The plane's autopilot would have continued to fly the plane until it ran out of fuel, and warning systems would have alerted the pilots to the problem. Also, the fighter jets would not have shot the plane out of the sky. They would have established visual contact with the pilots. Either way, the distracted pilots would have been alerted. Also, the article implies that the plane overshot their destination by 78 minutes, when they overshot their destination by only 16 minutes.