Let's get real here. Was it that big of a deal that two airline
pilots
over flew Minneapolis by 150 miles? Really, if you had a chance to
by-pass Minnesota, wouldn't you jump at the chance?
But apparently this was some sort of shocking news. The three
major networks came unglued and led with the silly story on Friday as
if world peace had been affected by this "asleep at the switch"
revelation.
All the anchors showed dismay and worried about the lives of all
those poor passengers. Hey, the darn plane was on automatic pilot and
the worse that could have happened was that it ended up in Toronto
which is nicer than Minnesota any day of the week. Eventually somebody
would have landed the thing.
Yes, it was news that the pilots suggested they lost orientation
for 90 minutes because they were engaged in a "heated discussion about
company policy" which one of the fly boys says is not true. Nonetheless
the air traffic controllers, sensing another hijacking, almost
scrambled the national guard jets to do what..shoot down the aircraft?
You may not know it, but lots of pilots on lots of planes fall
asleep. The real story here is that the airlines and the FAA have done
nothing about it.
Sure they have some regulations buried in some handbook somewhere
demanding that pilots have enough shut-eye at the end of one flight and
before they lift off on another. But come on, we know the airline
executives wink at that everyday because to enforce it would mean
they'd have to hire more pilots and that would impact the profit margin.
How about a story on that aspect and give the two poor schulbs who
missed Minnesota a break.
The only real winners here were the late night comics who got at
least five minutes of solid material out of the incident. So it was not
a total loss.