Posted on Fri, Oct. 30, 2009
YOU'RE MAKING that last step from the jetway onto the plane. The stewardess is smiling. First-class passengers are seated comfortably watching regular folk troop back to tiny seats in the six-across sections.
You glance to your left, into the cockpit. There they are, "Sky King" and his court in their peaked caps and crisp white shirts with the epaulets.
They look like pilots from central casting, trim as athletes with just enough gray at the temples to let you know they've done this before. They look, as they say in the hair-color ads, old enough to know what to do and young enough to still do it.
Arrayed before them is a control panel alive with dials and doodads, meters and video screens, stuff that beeps, buzzes and vibrates and emits LED signals. They are surrounded by enough toggle switches and levers and big buttons to keep them busy for hours.
Or maybe not.
Turns out that, for at least one cockpit crew, there was more important stuff to do than just sit there monitoring meters all evening. To hear them tell it, Capt. Timothy Cheney and First Officer Richard Cole were going over monthly crew schedules with their personal laptops when they should have been landing Northwest Airlines Flight 188 in Minneapolis.
That's their story and they're sticking to it. Can't blame them. Some of the earlier versions had them doing everything from arm-wrestling to power napping.
Whatever they were doing, they managed to overshoot the runway by six counties. They might still be cruising if a flight attendant hadn't reached them by intercom to let them know that Minneapolis was 150 miles behind them.
Also behind them are their careers. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded them this week pending an investigation.
They have 10 days to appeal to the National Transportation Safety Board. But they'd have a better chance of landing an Airbus in the Hudson River than making the NTSB reconsider this ruling.
Lonnie Heidtke of Chippewa Falls, Wis., told reporters who were interviewing passengers from Flight 188 that he thought the FAA was being a little harsh.
I could almost agree with Heidtke until I read a quote in which Capt. Cheney admitted that they had somehow had "lost track of time and place" while on their laptops.
Lost track of time and place?! What else are they supposed to be keeping track of with all that gadgetry if not time and place?
If a flight attendant armed only with a watch can sense that it's time to land, somebody in the cockpit should have had at least a clue.
The FAA took an understandably dim view.
"You engaged in conduct that put your passengers and your crew in serious jeopardy," FAA regional counsel Eddie Thomas wrote to Cheney.
"NW.188 was without communication with any air traffic control facility and with company dispatchers for a period of 91 minutes while you were on a frolic of your own."
Frolic seems a bit harsh. But you can see how a guy could get a little chafed after hearing the crew shrug this off as a momentary mental lapse.
When you're doing 500 mph at a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, a momentary lapse can be the difference between Minneapolis and Portland or life and death.
The Obama administration is looking into whether to include airliners in federal legislation that would restrict the use of electronic devices in vehicles.
Not a bad idea. But they may be missing the moral of this story.
These planes may be too easy to fly. They have auto-pilot to keep them on course, computer programs to do most of the heavy lifting during takeoff and landing and flight attendants with wristwatches.
The cockpit crew needs more to do. Maybe if we disconnect the power steering or required them to use hand signals for turns or to clutch before shifting - I don't know.
I just know that when I was driving my '58 Chevy Biscayne, I never lost track of time and place and I never missed Minneapolis by 150 miles.
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
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