Pilots forget to land plane due to using laptops

When driving you shouldn’t use a mobile phone, but an incident last week has proved that when piloting an aircraft you shouldn’t use a laptop.

You may have heard about the Northwest Flight 188 last Wednesday that caused concern as it went silent on the radio and failed to come in for its scheduled landing at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. When an Airbus 320 carrying 144 passengers fails to land it’s easy to fear the worst, but thankfully the aircraft did eventually land after going 150 miles off course.

So what was the cause of this flight going astray? A mechanical problem, electrical, fuel? None of the above. It turns out both pilots were using their own laptops and disregarded both radio communications and the flight controls for 78 minutes. This was only realized by the pilots when a flight attendant contacted the cockpit to ask how long until landing by which point the plane had flown past its intended airport.

An investigation as to what caused the incident was started which involved five hours of interviews with each pilot. During that time it was admitted that laptops were in use for an extended period of time with total disregard for control and communication on the flight. The voice recorder on the plane is to be reviewed to confirm the claims made by the pilots.

Passengers and flight attendants were apparently not aware that anything was wrong, but each passenger has been sent $500 in travel vouchers as an apology for what happened. Delta has suspended the pilots in question until the investigation is complete and issued a press release which stated:

Using laptops or engaging in activity unrelated to the pilots’ command of the aircraft during flight is strictly against the airline’s flight deck policies and violations of that policy will result in termination.

Read more at CNN.com