Don’t Just Blame The Laptop Pilots

October 28th, 2009. By Hunter West

So everybody is up in arms over the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot Minneapolis airport last week because the pilots were busy with their laptops. Monday night Jay Leno had a field day, suggesting that when two guys are bored, what do they do for fun? Bring out the laptops and surf for…well, you know what comes next. 

The pilots are suspended, as they should be. The public is outraged, as it should be. The outcome could have been far, far worse.  

But let’s look at it another way. There were some things that went right. There was no alcohol abuse. And the pilots weren’t tired. There was a 17-hour break for the two men between flights, which means they were well rested. 

Too many pilots because of fatigue, or illness have made too many deadly errors.

So let’s be thankful for that. 

True, we should not allow the focus to be removed from two experienced pilots who should have known better. The New York Times reported October 27th that there were 31,000 hours of flying time between the two men. That kind of lapse in judgment, by two experienced pilots with the lives of 144 people (not to mention flight crew) in their control cannot be discounted. The New York Times quoted Robert Mann Jr., a veteran industry analyst, as saying the actions of Captain Timothy B. Cheney and First Officer Richard I. Cole, were “inexcusable.” 

The pilots blame a new scheduling system put in place by Delta, which acquired Northwest last fall. C’mon guys, do ya think Sully would commit such a breach of cockpit rules by pulling out personal laptops to study content that should have been dealt with at home? Our Hudson hero, the fearless and unflappable Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, would never be caught dead doing something so stupid. 

The time it would have taken to collapse the programs and close the lid would have meant precious seconds that Sully—or any pilot—would need to respond to an emergency. 

The criticism is deserved. 

However, the criticism needs to be shared by an industry that has designed airliners to essentially fly themselves. “Taking away the potential for human error,” the designers say. Modern airliners are smart, intelligent and precise. What do we need a pilot for? To take-off and land maybe, but beyond that the plane can do its own flying. 

That’s part of the problem. It builds into the pilot a false sense of security. Never mind that there are some 150 people in a multi-ton behemoth laden with jet fuel flying at thousands of feet in the air. The plane can fly itself. It can maintain altitude and see where it’s going. No need to look out the window. Go ahead, open the laptop. Lose track of time (an hour-and-a-half) and become so engrossed in what you are doing that you don’t hear, or at least don’t bother to respond to a dozen air traffic controllers in three separate locations trying to get your attention. 

So engrossed are you that you’re not aware you’ve overshot your destination until you are over a hundred miles too far out. A flight attendant who, thank heavens is paying attention, finally comes in to see what the hell is going on. 

So blame the flyboys, yes. But also blame the minds that designed these planes to fly themselves. They need to share the blame. It’s human nature that when a process we’re so used to doing manually becomes automated and automatic, we pay less attention. 

This incident happened in the same week that the movie about the life of lost fly girl Amelia Earhart was released. Now, do you think Amelia and other pilots of her era would have had the luxury to whip out a laptop if the technology existed and lose track of time? Would Amelia have been able to pull out a book? 

Of course not. And even if she were alive today, she might resist anyway, even though the plane can do the work for her. She probably would have given up flying long ago, because some forward-thinking engineer had taken the fun out of it. 

As it is, cars are so easy to drive now—with power steering and automatic transmissions and cruise control and advanced braking and crash avoidance systems. We can yak away on our Blackberries as if we were sitting in our stationary living room. Governments have resorted to legislation in an effort to force us NOT to play with our GPS units, or do the crossword, or paint our nails… 

They’ll be developing a car that steers itself soon. Well, guess what happens next? Manufacturers, while trumpeting the huge leap in technology, will carefully warn that it does not preclude drivers from actually driving. You can’t let the car do it all, even though it can. 

But drivers will. Just like pilots will, from time to time. It’s human nature. 

These two guys screwed up, to be sure—putting human lives at risk because they weren’t paying attention. Had an emergency happened that would have required split-second decision-making, they could not have delivered. They should have known better. 

But this day was coming way back when they invented the autopilot. 

That’s why the people who built the plane, should share the late-night barbs. After all, they created the environment in which these two admittedly good and capable men experienced what could be a career-ending lapse of judgment.

Tags: Airplane, Delta, Northwest Airlines, Pilot Error

This was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Airlines, Court of Public Opinion . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.