Passengers that board airlines assume that the men and women at the wheel are trained, capable and experienced pilots. Have you ever asked the pilot for his or her credentials? The flying public takes it for granted that the airline and the FAA have already taken care of that.
Imagine being on a flight and finding out that your pilot is lost. As in, the pilot doesn't know where he is. Federal authorities refer to this as "losing situational awareness." This is just what happened to the pilot and co-pilot of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 between San Diego and Minneapolis.
How could this possibly happen, you ask? Let's count the ways.
First possibility: both pilots were asleep. While it is possible to doze in the warm cozy confines of a cockpit during a smooth flight, especially at night, it is unlikely that this would happen to both pilots simultaneously.
Second possibility: both pilots were overcome by an intruder or highjacker. This has happened in the past, as we all know, but reports indicate that the cockpit door was not breached.
Third possibility: both pilots were distracted. This is probably the most likely scenario. While seemingly benign, it does raise some legitimate safety questions.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the matter. Their early report indicates that both pilots were interviewed by FBI and airport police at Minneapolis. According to the NTSB, "The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness."
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the pilot and co-pilot were having an in depth (read: emotionally charged) discussion about their employment with Northwest. It is fairly common knowledge that the airlines are all having a tough time of it. Furloughed employees are the norm these days. Pensions and retirements have all but disappeared. Is it any wonder, then, that pilots are disgruntled about their jobs?
This happens every day in other avenues of employment. Picture two unhappy employees of a large department store, conversing in the lunch room over their respective schedules and their low pay. The two might well lose track of their time and possibly chat beyond their lunch hour. Seems plausible. But change the lunchroom to a cockpit and you have a real problem. Not to mention a public relations migraine for the airline.
The reality is that general aviation pilots (ie, private pilots of small airplanes) get lost from time to time. This is so despite the training that we receive, and the mantra that we need to keep track of where we are (positional awareness) at all times. Pilots are taught to use their charts to plot their flight path, and to look down to see if the lay of the land matches what they see on their charts. ( Yes, we really do this.) To make things even easier, we have electronic instruments and navigation radios that tell us where we are, much like the GPS devices that so many drivers have in their cars. But pilots have one more advantage: Air Traffic Control (ATC) keeps an eye on us too. If we stray from our assigned altitude, ATC tells us. If we start heading in the wrong direction, ATC alerts us.
Which is why the Northwest Airlines incident is so difficult to understand. Each pilot was either wearing a headset with a microphone, or was listening to ATC on a speaker. Pilots of airlines MUST stay in radio contact with ATC at all times. So what happened here? Did the pilots have the volume turned down so they could chat? This is certainly something to be considered, but it appears that they had no contact with ATC for over fifteen minutes. And during this period of time, ATC would have tried many times to raise them on the radio frequency assigned to them. One can only imagine what havoc this must have caused on the ground, with the authorities not having any idea whatsoever as to what was going wrong with the flight.
The investigation will continue, and the pilots will be on administrative leave. The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) which picks up sounds in the cockpit, will be analyzed. The flight data recorder (FDR) which records how the aircraft was handled in the air, will be analyzed as well. When the dust settles, it is unlikely that any of the answers will be acceptable to a safety minded flying public. This is once again a reminder that, even in a state of the art Airbus A320 replete with fly by wire technology with advanced flight systems and avionics, it is the nut behind the wheel that has to make everything work.
