Plane overshoots Mumbai as both pilots go to sleep

Times of India ^ | 6/26/08

[Red Badger]

This wouldn’t happen if they just allowed gays to get married............

[C210N]

Two 'go!' airline pilots fell asleep while flying from Honolulu to Hilo, cruising past their destination for 18 minutes...

Not a good location to catch up on zzz's. With fuel levels carefully measured for just the flight (plus legal reserves of 45 minutes), only a few minutes longer would have caused a forced ocean ditching.

[kbennkc]

This would have been a good opportunity for the old placing their hand in a pail of warm water joke .

[saganite]

, the plane was about half way to Goa.

“You can’t land here! Goa round.”

[CWWren]

Might have been bitten by an errant tse-tse fly causing sleeping sickness.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

These are the types of cheap flights Bill Shatner gets you on via PriceLine.com

[TommyDale]

Reminds me of the Delta/Western flights landing at the wrong airports, overshooting SFO all the way out the the Farallon Islands, and a few other mistakes.

[Cecily]

Air India needs to stock up on this:

[Publius6961]

I suppose falling asleep can be deemed technically accurate as "communications failure."

I marvel at modern technology, and the benefits it provides. I marvel more at the other similar events that we will never hear about, since the complex technology silently worked as intended.

[Verginius Rufus]

There’s an airport on the Farallons? Never knew that.

[Dr. Ursus]

Maybe pilot seats need a joy buzzer for these situations!

[fso301]

A friend of the family is a retired commercial airlines pilot and he said one time on a flight, the crew dozed off simultaneously for about 15 minutes. When they awoke and realized their predicament, they declared a weather emergency and diverted to the nearest airport. No one ever found them out.

[muleskinner]

What happened to Bombay? What? Reminds everyone of the Empire? Mumbai sounds pussified.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Or a wakeup call.

[Eepsy]

I don’t get it either. It’s not like we go around calling Japan “Nippon” or Vienna “Wien”....

[TommyDale]

"There’s an airport on the Farallons? Never knew that."

No, but they were over the Farallons before they realized they had over shot SFO. One of the passengers happened to be Dave Barry. He later wrote a column about it called "Things You Don't Want to Know".

[Jaxter]

On the bright side, the passengers got a lot of extra frequent flyer miles.

[Political Junkie Too]

LOL! Is attempted hijacking of a topic about planes the same as attempted hihacking of a plane?

-PJ

[JRios1968]

...the plane was about half way to Goa.

WHOA!