UPDATED:
Federal investigators are examining whether two Northwest Airlines pilots fell asleep, experienced mechanical problems or were distracted — as the captains claim — by an argument that caused them to overshoot their landing Wednesday night at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport by 150 miles.
“We have not ruled out anything at this point,” said Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Drug and alcohol tests have not yet been ordered by federal officials, Mr. Holloway said, but the pilots reportedly have been grounded pending the investigation.
Air traffic control and airline officials tried repeatedly to reach the captains of Flight 188, which was carrying 147 passengers from San Diego, but it wound up in Wisconsin before the pilots were finally reached.
In an interview Friday with Associated Press, Richard Cole, the first officer of the jet, denied that he and the flight’s captain, Timothy B. Cheney, fought or fell asleep in the cockpit.
“It was not a serious event, from a safety issue,” Cole said in front of his Salem, Ore., home. “I would tell you more, but I’ve already told you way too much.”
He would not discuss why it took so long for the pilots to respond to radio calls but said the passengers were never in any danger.
“We were not asleep; we were not having an argument; we were not having a fight,” Cole told Associated Press. “I can tell you that airplanes lose contact with the ground people all the time. It happens. Sometimes they get together right away; sometimes it takes awhile before one or the other notices that they are not in contact.”
Asked whether pilots had ever missed an airport landing by so many miles in the past, Mr. Holloway said, “I don’t know exactly if this has happened before, but I would say it’s rare.”
Most recently, in February 2008, a Go! Airlines flight overshot Hilo International Airport near Honolulu by 30 miles. The pilots later confessed they were asleep at the time.
During the Northwest incident, armed F-16 military jets were ordered on standby to intercept the commercial flight in the event that it had been hijacked.
As one of the nation’s largest airlines, Northwest has endured numerous controversies including more than 20 crashes, labor disputes, a suspected-terrorist probe and the first drinking-and-flying convictions in the nation.
In June 2004, a Northwest Airlines flight headed for Rapid City, S.D., landed instead a few miles off course at Ellsworth Air Force Base, and passengers waited in the plane for more than three hours while their crew was interrogated.
Also in the summer of 2004, a Northwest flight carrying more than a dozen musicians, mostly from Syria, had a disturbance on the plane that air marshals described at the time as a possible terrorist act or dry-run for an attack.
In 2001, a co-pilot was fired after failing a blood-alcohol test, and in 1990, three Northwest pilots became the first to be convicted for flying a jetliner while intoxicated.
Investigators will only hear the last 30 minutes of what happened on the latest flight, since that’s all that was captured by the cockpit recording aboard the older Airbus A320, Mr. Holloway said.
The plane flew over its destination airport at 7:58 p.m. CDT and continued to fly northeast at 37,000 feet for 150 miles, according to the NTSB.
It wasn’t until the control tower finally spoke to the pilots at 8:14 p.m. that they reported they had become disoriented and asked to return to the airport for landing.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the crew was interviewed by the FBI and airport police. The pilots said they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness. The safety board is scheduling an interview with the crew.
• Researcher John Haydon contributed to this report.
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