Pilots overshoot destination by 150 miles

WASHINGTON — Two pilots who overshot their destination by 150 miles (240 kilometers) before turning back should have had many warnings as they approached and passed Minneapolis: cockpit displays, controllers trying to reach them, the city lights twinkling below.

The crew told authorities they were distracted during a heated discussion over airline policy, the Federal Aviation Administration said. But federal officials are investigating whether pilot fatigue might be to blame.

The Northwest Airlines pilots didn’t discover their mistake until a flight attendant in the cabin contacted them by intercom, said a source close to the investigation who wasn’t authorized to talk publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. By that time, the plane was over Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the pilots had been out of communication with air traffic controllers for over an hour.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Thursday investigators hadn’t yet questioned the pilots and didn’t know whether it was possible they had fallen asleep. The pilots have been suspended from flying by their airline while it, too, investigates.

The plane, en route from San Diego with 144 passengers and a crew of five, passed over its destination of Minneapolis at 37,000 feet (11,280 meters) just before 9 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0100 GMT Thursday). Contact with controllers wasn’t established until 14 minutes later, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident.

As of Thursday, NTSB investigators had not yet examined the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which were being sent to Washington for analysis.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. “The pilots are saying they were involved in a heated conversation. Well, that was a very long conversation.”

Ben Berman, an airline pilot and former chief of major accident investigations at the NTSB, said it becomes second nature for pilots to know when they need to begin landing preparations.

Those preparation should have begun when the flight was still 100 miles (160 kilometers) or more away from Minneapolis, he said. It would require a fairly dramatic event to lose track of that kind of awareness, he said.

Shop talk “pretty clearly wasn’t all that was going on,” Berman said.

The bright lights of Minneapolis should have alerted the pilots that they were over their destination, just as the dimmer lights of Eau Claire should have warned them they were in the wrong place, experts said.

While the passengers were apparently unaware what was happening as they passed their destination, police on the ground were preparing for the worst and the Air National Guard had put fighter jets on alert at two locations.

Andrea Allmon, who had been traveling from San Diego on business, didn’t know anything was amiss.

“Everybody got up to get their luggage, and the plane was swarmed by police as we were getting our bags down from the overhead bins,” she said.

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