Remember Richard Cole and Timothy Cheney, the two Northwest Air pilots who overshot their destination city by 150 miles and had to turn around and go back?  Well, the two men are finally talking.  After having denied falling asleep (repeatedly), the two say they were out of contact with air traffic control for over an hour because Cole, the first officer, was helping pilot Cheney plan the monthly crew schedule on their respective laptops.

That’s a very convenient, and somewhat plausible, excuse, but that still doesn’t mean those two are keeping their jobs.  If anything, that means they should be fired even faster.  Accidents are one thing, but deliberately ignoring the tower so you can do some paperwork is against Delta regulations.  In fact, doing anything not related to the process of flying the plane at an altitude below 10,000 feet is an offense so grievous that pilots can and do lose their license over it.

The two have admitted to not paying attention to air traffic control, messages from their airline, or their instrument panels.  That’s like putting a car on cruise control so you can read a book or take a nap, but worse because you’re piloting a giant tube full of highly explosive jet fuel at several hundred miles an hour several thousand miles above the earth’s surface.  So yeah, probably not the best time to figure out who takes what vacations when.

Tags: Northwest Airlines, Delta Airlines, Northwest, excuses, Richard Cole, Timothy Cheney, plane missed destination city because of scheduling, laptop computers, crew scheduling

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