Wayward Northwest Pilots Appeal Suspension

Licenses To Fly Revoked After Unwittingly Overshooting Destination by 150 Miles

(AP)  The Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles have filed appeals of their license revocations with the National Transportation Safety Board.

The appeals were filed late Wednesday, said board spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz. He said that appeals typically are heard by an administrative law judge with the board within 120 days.

The Federal Aviation Administration revoked the licenses of Capt. Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Washington, and First Officer Richard Cole of Salem, Oregon, last week. The agency said the pilots put the 144 passengers of Northwest Flight 188 in serious danger on Oct. 21 when they failed to communicate with anyone on the ground for 91 minutes despite repeated attempts by air traffic controllers and their own airline to reach them.

Cheney and Cole told investigators they lost track of time and place while working on crew scheduling on their laptops. They said they didn't realize their situation until a flight attendant contacted them on the intercom to ask when the plane would be landing. By then, the Airbus A320 was over Wisconsin at 37,000 feet. The pilots turned the plane around and landed safely in Minneapolis.

Attorneys for the pilots didn't immediately reply to requests for comment on Thursday.

The incident raised national security concerns. Senior White House officials were notified by the White House situation room during the incident. Fighter jets in two locations were moments away from taking off to track down the errant airliner when contact was re-established.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced a bill Thursday to ban nonessential electronics, including personal laptops, from the cockpit.

"We simply want to ensure that, with all of the electronic distractions available these days, flying the plane remains the their one and only focus," Menendez said in a statement.

Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Randy Babbitt said Wednesday that the Northwest incident is the result of an erosion of professionalism among commercial airline pilots.

"I think that this is a sign of a much bigger problem," Babbitt said in a speech to an aviation club. "I can't regulate professionalism. With everything we know about human factors, there are still those who just ignore the commonsense rules of safety."

[sylevine1]

Even though there is no excuse for the pilots not communicating they have served the country well. They proved that the US via the FAA and NTSB isn't protecting us any better than on 9/11. The time that there was no communication with the Flt 188 pilots is longer than the time that the two planes took off and crashed into the World Trade Center pm 9/11. No fighters took off all during that time. Thus, as an emergency drill Flight 188 proved that we were unprotected and that is just as we were on 9/11. A year prior to 9/11 we knew that hijacking was a major threat and blogs had planes crashing into the World Trade Center and assessing the damage. The FAA and the NTSB did nothing then and allowed this known threat to materialize into an national disaster that killed 3000 people.

A year prior to 9/11 I spoke at the International Aviation Safety Association about preventing decompression crashes like golfer Payne Stewart and hijacking from occuring. On November 13th of this year I spoke on these issues at the Advanced Aviation Manufacturing Conference in St. Augustine, Florida. In that talk I also spoke of the Air France Flight 488 crash of an Airbus where the Black Boxes haven't been recovered from the Atlantic. The 9/11 crashes into the World Trade Center's Black Boxes also have never been recovered.

The fact is that it easy to tranmit the data to the ground for safe ground storage and it also easy to prevent 9/11 if we have the will to do it if the leaders of our nation committed to accomplish this.
Hopefully no terrorist will take advantage of our egregious system.

If your interested in this material see http://www.safelander.com

I win all sorts of awards at technical meetings and everyone asks why isn't done. I lost a friend on a recurring air crash that I sent on a work assignment. The people who head our government and its aviation agencies have never lost anyone and that is the major reason for these crashes.

Sincerely,
Sy
[e-mail]

[SAMTORRES66]

90 day suspension / no pay.. that will teach them a leason. Maybe 15 day jail sentence.

[myopinionpal]

They would of been better off saying that they were over worked and fell asleep. But no what did they say, we were on our laptops playing solitaire, knowing that laptop use in the cockpit was aganist the airlines policy. Sometime you have to lie a little to keep your job.

[mtcolquitt]

Lying is never a good thing. That's what got them here in the first place!
Clue:(Against the Airline's policy) That's right, you said it.
Hope you don't have kids.

[filmguy107]

***!!!!!!!!! Who'd want to fly with them??? You gotta be kidding. This is a textbook instance of gall.

[Ordflyer]

Why don't these pilots cut the cr@p?!!

IMO, THEY FELL ASLEEP. There is nothing pubically known to support their lame story. Yet logic clearly suggests that they were both asleep...

It's actually way less stupid than their lame laptop excuse...

[myopinionpal]

Ordflyer:.....They don't know how to tell a good lie.

[edgy44]

I would let them keep their private pilots license, but certainly would never allow them to have an ATP or commercial license. These two guys would be fantastic assets in a flight simulator instructor/evaluation role, but should never be trusted with carrying passengers ever again. Plus, they are each getting close to mandatory retirement anyway.