Posted on 10/27/2009 5:39:04 PM PDT by SloopJohnB
The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday revoked the licenses of the two Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles.
The pilots — Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Wash., the captain, and Richard Cole of Salem, Ore., the first officer — told safety investigators they were working on their personal laptop computers and lost track of time and place.
The pilots, who were out of communications with air traffic controllers for 91 minutes, violated numerous federal safety regulations in the incident last Wednesday night, the FAA said in a statement. The violations included failing to comply with air traffic control instructions and clearances and operating carelessly and recklessly, the agency said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
It is fairly common to lose contact with the center. If the controller is overworked and waits a little bit too late to turn you over and you are at the very edge of his area, and perhaps you have a radio that is not up to snuff, you don’t hear the call.
But airline pilots fly the same route over and over and can remember most frequencies without looking at the charts.
The closest I ever came to living like an airline pilot was back in the early 60’s when I had a daughter in the polio hospital at Warm Springs, GA.
For months and months, I flew every single Friday to Columbus, GA, back to GSO that night, back to Columbus Sunday morning and back to Greensboro
Sunday night.
I knew by heart every frequency and within a few miles of when I would be passed on to the next.
That experience makes it even more of a mystery.
When those guys lost Denver, they should have known to go to the next frequency.
I don’t think we have yet heard the truth of what happened on that flight.
Whether they lied or whether they quit flying the airplane, they should be fired. Either one is a reason for termination.
ping
I’d like to hear the transmissions on the handoff from Denver. Denver controller should have kept trying until he got an acknowledgement. I also wonder how long it took Minneapolis approach to realize the pilots wern’t with them after the handoff.
“I meant that I think they screwed themselves legally and professionally because they chose a story for which there is no excuse for a professional pilot.”
Well, call me a Phillistine (with 25k+ hrs), but perhaps the best thing they could have done was tell the truth. IMHO the laptop story is bogus. Back when laptops were “legal”, I never heard of a problem with them, and I used them a lot. Nah, it ain’t laptop use that got these guys in trouble. ATC? Possibly, but only peripherally. Not that ATC won’t try to hang you for their own mistakes. I can count on two hands the number of times they tried to violate us. They always got hung when the tapes were reviewed. ATC already knows what their level of culpability is, if any. In this case it may actually be publicized.
As to the crew....well, they screwed up. Since I was only an unwashed Boeing driver, I can only go by my own experience. If my rapidly failing neurons can be trusted, the Boeing makes all sorts of unpleasant noises when you reach a top of descent point and don’t descend. Understand that the “Eurotrash” may have very different ideas about how to handle this indiscretion, as well as what is to be done when you reach an end of route point (MSP), at cruise altitude and speed.
Suffice to say that a Boeing would tend to get “noisy” well before reaching MSP if it was still boring along at cruise altitude. Any A320/Boeing drivers (there are many), that can compare and contrast the reactions of the FMS and Airbus equivalent in an aircraft that has not been allowed to descend from a calculated Top Of Descent point?
It would be an interesting comparison, and in the case of the Airbus, quite applicable.
It would be nice if folks just told the truth. It would make things so much simpler for everyone.
I flew the area between MSP and SD several times but it has been years ago so I forget where the line is between the centers.
But the flight was at 37,000 if the media reported correctly.
Which means Denver center normally would turn the flight over to Minneapolis Center and and then turned over to MSP approach after getting assigned a lower altitude.
So the guys in approach would do nothing until they got the hand off from center.
Once it was determined the flight was not acting normally, then everyone would alert everyone else and ask each to attempt contract.
But there again, I don’t know where the boundaries are. Too many years have passed.
Certainly they were monitoring the guard freq.
I never flew the big iron, but I can imagine there is a bell, chime or horn for everything.
You sure are correct about telling the truth. I used to have salesmen that were always asking “What do I tell them” referencing late deliveries, etc.
My standard reply was always “You might as well tell them the truth, the truth will eventually come out anyway.”
To bad those guys don’t get it.
Just for the heck of it I’ll try to get ahold of my pilot friend and see if he knows, well he should know he flies in and out of DEN regularly for Southwest. I’m curios where the DEN center cutoff is too. Then with that I can figure the miles they were out of contact too.
Here is a map of the center boundaries from Wiki. ZDV being Denver, ZMP being Minneapolis. Boundary between is basically right down the middle of Nebraska.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/Tfrmap.jpeg
I flew light twins so I didn’t have the kind of bells, whistles, chimes and nagging cabin crews you had.
On any leg over 3 hours, my bladder was my bell, whistle and chime. I was looking for the descent point.
And referencing the lap tops, as you well know the term mult-tasking was invented for instrument flying. Anyone that can’t fly, scan, find that intersection on the chart, scan, change the freq, scan, change the power setting, scan...would never make it to the point that he would get a position flying the big iron.
Your are right. They are lying.
“You might as well tell them the truth, the truth will eventually come out anyway.”
Yup. And if you’re ever called into the Chief Pilot’s office re. an incident, you’re accompanied by your reputation for telling the truth. If you always shoot straight, it tends to cut through the BS that gets thrown up by everyone that has no problem with fibbing.
It’s been eight years since I left the line, but up to that point most folks I flew with were Boy Scouts. Of course, there were always those that played fast and loose with reality, but they were well known by everyone, including management. I don’t recall anyone that ever got hurt by being honest, since misrepresenting can kill you, and others. It is not acceptable to endanger folks due to your own culpability (there’s an old Eagle Scout talking). You’re correct, this will get sorted out, but it’s being made harder by obscurations.
It sounds like foolish people are at work here.
Looking at that, I would say that MSP approach would have been totally out of the loop until it became a concern that there might possibly be an emergency of some sort.
At 37,000 the flight was never in their territory. Even with the knowledge that the flight was an inbound, they would probably look at the target and think he was diverting to O’hare or something.
I saw the flight path on Flightaware and it isn’t like he was high or low. From the track I saw they were heading right down the middle of MSP center territory. So it didn’t get noticed that they didn’t switch over to MSP center and approach. Basically no one noticed them and that there was no contact until they were on top of MSP. So besides the pilots being dumb asses, I wonder what the people at MSP approach were doing. Well, like I posted on Flyertalk that was then posted here, my pilot friend said that he bet that someone in the centers dropped the ball and will get in trouble. It looks like he may be right. Will be interesting to follow this more and hear what else comes out.
It happens all the time. I remember Chuck Yeager in his biography saying he did it all the time when flying cross country (not while being a test pilot though).
This is why we are hearing speculation from so many pilots that the crew fell asleep. They've done it themselves or know of other pilots who have.
You are correct that flying the plane is #1. In my Air Force days the saying was Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. In that order. The plane that flew into the Florida swamp was an L-1011.
Let's just say, I doubt it. If ATC calls and you don't answer, you're not going to be flying for very long. I suppose if you have a really good autopilot (which I never had) which does navigation across waypoints, you might be able to claim radio failure once or twice and get away with it.
There is just so much wrong with this story. When I'm flying commercially, I am usually quite aware of where I am if I can see the ground. Going into Newark here from anywhere in the US, being out over the ocean would sort of be a big clue that something was wrong. My guess is that Minneapolis, or wherever they were going, gives similar "clues." Even if I cannot see the ground, I know when the plane should be descending. And even if the crew was clueless, I find it surprising that no passenger tried to find out what was going on.
ML/NJ
As I explained, they were not in MSP approach air space. Approach only handles aircraft below 10,000 ft in most instances. Obviously Denver would need more airspace.
I quit 11 years ago and disposed of all of my old charts, Airman’s Guides, etc., so my memory may not be exact.
But approach would pay no attention to a flight at 37,000 ft. unless center called them and set up the descent with them.
I missed it if MSP center’s part in this has been described in any detail. We don’t know that they missed an aircraft flying through their airspace. My guess is that they did not miss it, that they were advised by Denver as well as seeing the flight and that they made attempts to contact them.
It will all come out.
By the way, I know not how busy MSP is nowadays, but when I flew into and out of there it was during the best days of NorthWest and it was a very busy airport. Plus there were a half dozen or so satellite airports also with instrument approaches which made for a busy time for controllers. So no controller would likely have time to think about a flight 27,000 ft above his territory.
” If ATC calls and you don’t answer, you’re not going to be flying for very long.”
Well, that’s not entirely true, but sort of true. It is quite common for ATC to get busy with “something else”, and you just go over the horizon from them. Of course, ATC can tell another flight to have you switch to another freq., and that is done quite commonly. But even if you go lost comm, it still isn’t a big deal. It’s quite common actually. You are simply going to proceed on your filed flightplan. That’s what regulations require, and that’s what ATC will expect you to do. Kinda’ makes sense.
From a nav standpoint, it simplifies things for the crew. The plane just tracks along the route as programmed. You really don’t touch anything as the flight computer is all programmed before you leave the ground. If you have had no experience with a “sophisticated” autopilot and flight management system (and I had not before getting into the airline business), you really missed a treat. Very precise automated navigation, and they are getting better at this. You never really trust the system (unless you’re dumb), but when everything works as programmed and ATC doesn’t mess with you it is truly a technological marvel. It’s so good that you really don’t fly the plane during much of the enroute segment. You monitor. An occasional bit of buttonpushing, but to actually handfly the aircraft during the enroute phase. HORRORS! The aircraft has the potential to do the job so much better than you, so as long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to, you don’t mess with it.
In the event of lost com if your “blip” is proceeding via the flightplan, ATC might be a little excited, but not so much. The expectation is that the crew will get the com problem sorted out down the line, and that’s usually what happens. It’s really annoying to have to dig out the appropriate enroute freq from your chart though (you know the feeling I’m sure). The problem can come when ATC has taken you off the flight planned route, and placed you on a heading, then promptly forgotten about you leaving you boresighted at Area 51. We alleviated the problem, no thanks to ATC, as the military types tend to throw a snit if you transgress on their inner sanctum. There was opportunity to see some interesting territory not generally seen by mere civilians though. ;-)
A good post for the edification of non pilots.
Thanks.
I have no experience in the flight levels, but I have always understood that above 30,000 most aircraft have a very small flight envelope and for that reason hand flying them requires so much concentration that it is no fun. That the autopilot is almost a necessity above FL 30 because it is so tedious.
Is that correct?
NEVER happened to me while I was flying (now not for 15 years or so) nor to anyone on any frequency I was monitoring. Obviously there are procedures for what to do if you lose communications with ATC (follow flight plan, duh, that's what it's there for) but I never lost communications when I was IFR, and I don't recall ever hearing ATC having a hard time raising someone else on the the frequency. Maybe things are different now, or here in the northeast?
BTW, my instrument instructor was one of those guys Reagan fired, a senior guy at NY Center. We talked about a lot of stuff, but I don't recall his ever having talked about having trouble talking to flights he was supposed to be controlling.
ML/NJ
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
