Airliner overshoots airport; controllers feared hijacking

[Rockville]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Northwest Airlines flight from San Diego, California, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, overshot the Minneapolis airport by about 150 miles Wednesday evening, and federal investigators are looking into whether the pilots had become distracted, as they claimed, or perhaps fallen asleep.
Air traffic controllers lost radio communication with the Airbus A320, carrying 147 passengers and an unknown number of crew, when it was flying at 37,000 feet, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. There was no communication with Flight 188 for more than an hour as it approached the airport, the board said.
When air traffic controllers finally made contact with the pilot, his answers were so vague that controllers feared the plane might have been hijacked, according to a source familiar with the incident.
The controllers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ordered the pilot to make a series of unnecessary maneuvers to convince them the pilots were in control of the flight, the source said, adding that fighter jets were poised in Madison, Wisconsin, but were never deployed.
Controllers tracked the aircraft on radar as it flew over its intended destination -- Minneapolis-St. Paul International/Wold-Chamberlain Airport -- and continued northeast for about 150 miles over the next 16 minutes. The airport's controllers then re-established communication with crew members, who said they had become distracted, the safety board said.
"The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness," the board said in a news release.
A federal official, who asked not to be identified, told CNN that air traffic controllers in the Denver, Colorado, area had communicated with the pilot, but the pilots were "nonresponsive" during a subsequent communication. The plane was handed off to controllers in Minneapolis as a NORDO, the designation for "no radio communications."
The Federal Aviation Administration contacted the airline and had its dispatcher try to reach the pilots, the federal official said.
Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said numerous controllers were involved in efforts to contact the plane, including text messages, and that "concern escalated" as the pilot neared the airport "without making any effort to descend."
Ultimately, controllers contacted two other Northwest planes, asking them to try to reach Flight 188 through its last known frequency. One of those planes succeeded, prompting the pilot to contact Minneapolis, Church said.
"It was pretty good ATC (air traffic control) detective work," he added.
An NTSB spokesman said the agency is examining all possible explanations for the incident, including whether the pilots might have fallen asleep.
The safety board said it is scheduling an interview with the crew and has secured the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder for examination. The recorders capture cockpit conversations and other noises.
Reported instances of two pilots falling asleep are rare. In August, the safety board concluded its investigation into a February 13, 2008, incident in which two pilots aboard a Go airlines flight fell asleep and traveled 26 miles beyond the destination of Hilo, Hawaii, before waking and contacting air traffic controllers.
Northwest Airlines is part of Delta Air Lines, which issued a statement Thursday, saying it is "cooperating with the FAA and NTSB in their investigation, as well as conducting our own internal investigation. The pilots have been relieved from active flying pending the completion of these investigations."
It said Flight 188 landed safely in Minneapolis just after 9 p.m.
Delta suffered another major embarrassment this week when a Delta pilot landed a passenger jet on a taxiway at Atlanta-Hartsfield International Airport instead of the runway. The NTSB also is investigating that case.

CNN, October 23, 2009

[Hurricane]

According Dutch newsreports the crew where in a heavy discussion about the way DL/NW was doing at the moment....

... Still it remains "impressive" to completly mis an airport

Adios, H.

[AC974]

Based on what has been reported in the press so far I feel that the cockpit crew were asleep . Things don't just add up .

[Henk Voortwijs]

Flight attendant caught wayward pilots unaware
By JOAN LOWY and JOSHUA FREEDAP

WASHINGTON -A call from a flight attendant to the pilots of the Northwest
Airlines plane that overshot Minneapolis catapulted the cockpit crew from
complacency to confusion.

Interviews with the flight crew and other documents released Wednesday by
the National Transportation Safety Board indicate the pilots were completely
unaware of their predicament until the moment the intercom rang. They were
unaware that they had flown their Airbus A320 with 144 passenger more than
100 miles past their destination, that air traffic controllers and their
airline's dispatchers had been struggling to reach them for more than an
hour, or that the military was at that moment readying fighter jets for an
intercept mission.

Timothy Cheney, the captain of Flight 188, said he looked up from his
laptop to discover there was no longer any flight information programmed into
the Airbus A320's computer. He said his navigation system showed Duluth,
Minnesota, off to his left and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, ahead on the right.

The plane had been out of radio contact for 77 minutes as it flew across a
broad swath of the country on Oct. 21, raising national security concerns.

Cheney, 54, and First Officer Richard Cole, 54, told investigators they had
taken out their laptops and were absorbed in working on a complicated crew
scheduling program that they were required to learn following Delta Air
Lines' acquisition of Northwest a year earlier. Cole told investigators they
became distracted as they "got deeper and deeper into it."

Cheney said he was "blown away" by how long the conversation - which was
only supposed to take about 10 minutes - went on. Investigators wrote that
Cheney felt embarrassed. Their report quotes him saying "I was wrong" and
that he "let another force come from the outside and distract me."

The tension of the moment the pilots became aware of their predicament was
evident in the crew interviews.

According to a statement signed by flight attendant Barbara Logan, she
called the cockpit around 8:15 p.m. CDT to find out when they would be landing.
She was told they would land around 12 Greenwich Mean Time. "I said I did
not know the time - he said I was hosed and hung up."

The lead flight attendant called to get gate information and was apparently
also hung up on, according to Logan's report. That flight attendant later
got through to the cockpit.

Investigators' interviews with Cheney and Cole also hint at tension between
the pilots. The pair were flying together for the first time. Cheney
characterized Cole's piloting skills as "OK, but I've flown with better." He
complained that Cole had missed some steps when they were readying for takeoff
because he apparently was still learning Delta's procedures.

Both pilots are appealing the FAA's revocation of their licenses. Cole has
cited his reliance on Cheney as the pilot in charge as a mitigating factor
in his case.

Delta spokesman Anthony Black said the two pilots remain suspended while
Delta investigates the incident.

Flight 188 wasn't the only Northwest operation that was hard to reach that
night. A controller who called Northwest's dispatchers to ask them to
contact the plane first encountered a recording telling him the phone number had
been changed. He dialed the new number, but the phone rang 10 to 20 times
without being answered, he told investigators. He hung up, then redialed.

This time, someone at the dispatch office answered the phone - and put him
on hold.

The Federal Aviation Administration has since said the phone numbers
controllers had for Northwest predated its acquisition by Delta and have now
been updated.

Northwest dispatchers ultimately sent 15 text messages to the cockpit
asking pilots to contact controllers, but there was no response. The pilots said
they didn't notice the messages until after they re-established contact.
Cole said he later inadvertently pushed the "delete all" button, erasing the
messages.

The first controllers the pilots spoke to after becoming aware of their
situation turned out to be in Winnipeg, Canada. They had failed to switch
their radio frequency from one used by controllers in Denver to one used by
Minneapolis controllers. They were still using the Denver frequency - which is
the same as the Winnipeg frequency - when they tried to reach air traffic
control.

The NTSB's investigation into the incident has also exposed weaknesses in
communications between controllers and the Domestic Events Network, or DEN,
which is essentially a running conference call between air traffic
controllers, military commanders, and other authorities involved in aviation
security that was established after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The manager on duty at the Minneapolis air traffic control facility that
evening couldn't be reached by the network at one point. The network's
speaker is at her desk, but her duties overseeing controllers take her away from
the desk.

The same manager also told investigators she asked someone on network to
call her by phone to discuss the possible need for fighters to intercept the
plane because she wasn't sure the network's communications were secure.
Only later did she realize the network had been setup in part to provide
secure communications.

[aviodromefriend]

Blaming a merge....

They had better practiced that for them new program being on the ground.

And if they planned this to be done in 10 minutes, even in 10 minutes things can go much more wrong than what happened at this flight.