Maersk Air – Charter Airline

It’s one thing to be distracted when you’re on the job. You might surf YouTube for ten minutes to refresh your brain, or answer an instant message from a coworker and get a bit off track, but you usually get back to the task at hand within minutes.

It’s quite another thing to engage in such activity while flying a plane, which is exactly what two pilots did last week.The two pilots from Northwest Airlines didn’t just create a minor blip, either. They overshot their own landing by 150 miles, were out of radio contact for 90 minutes and left over 140 passengers worried during their journey–all because they were both playing on their laptops during the flight.

The military even almost became involved at one point for fear of another national security disaster.

Okay, when people scoff that it’s more dangerous to be in car than in an airplane, and that riding in a plane is a perfectly safe way to travel, perhaps their words of wisdom don’t hold up as much as they have in the past.

People are often being told to stop talking–and especially texting–on their cell phones while driving their cars (or a bus or train…); perhaps a campaign against web browsing while flying a plane full of passengers is needed as well.

The two pilots, who violated aviation policy with their little laptop break, had their licences revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration as a result.

While some are arguing that these pilots must have been under severe stress to do such a thing–and it’s true that pilots have been enduring a lot during the economic crisis in the country right now–common sense has to come in somewhere. You’re flying a plane. In the sky. With over a hundred lives in your hands. You shouldn’t be on your laptop.

Tags: air travel, airline news, pilot news, pilots forget to land plane

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Jet Charter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.