Airliner crew flies 150 miles past airport

On Oct 27, 12:09*am, Mike Ash wrote:
In article
,





*a wrote:
On Oct 26, 10:12*pm, Mike Ash wrote:
In article
,

*george wrote:
On Oct 26, 11:40*am, Mike Ash wrote:
In article
,
*D Ramapriya wrote:

On Oct 24, 8:35*pm, "Aluckyguess" wrote:
"Richard" wrote in message

I have a hard time texting over 13k feet.
they fell asleep. *Im surprised this doesnt happen more often with
small
aircraft. You engage that auto-pilot and its just so relaxing.. Turn
on
the
xm tilt your head back and life is good, no one to bother you ask
you
for
things no you know what your daughter did or can you fix this or
that.
Nope,
just smooth flying across a beautiful country.

I'm sure the specifics will emerge over time but I find it a bit
curious that there's no mention about even a possibility that the
A320's nav system may have experienced a glitch.

Occam's razor: it's simpler and more believable (at least to me) that
two pilots who were negligent enough to fall asleep (or whatever crazy
thing they did) were also negligent enough to screw up the nav system
set up, or at least leave it in a mode which required manual
intervention to continue to the next phase of flight.

It's the accent upon the 100+ miles that gets me.
In a car world 100+ miles -is- a long way.
In an airliner at 400 knots that's 15 minutes.

News companies are more interested in getting a story than actually
informing people. "150 miles" sounds scarier and gets more eyeballs than
"15 minutes", so that's what they print. It's sad, but I don't know how
to fix it.

Mike, it's been written they were not in contact with center for the
order of an hour. Even at 10,000 feet I'm looking for lower 15 or 20
minutes from my ETA for a gradual letdown, and I expect those folks
plan their descent better than I do.

Yeah, I don't mean to minimize what happened. Ignoring the radios for an
hour was extremely bad. It just seems to me that the media focuses on
the wrong thing. "Missed the airport by 150 miles" is not a whole lot,
and is not the important part of the story. "Out of contact for an hour"
is, but you don't see that in the headlines.

--
Mike Ash
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

Radio Free Earth

There's something of a different lesson here, isn't there? We, who
know something about aviation, find flaws with the reporters who focus
on elements of the story that are not important. Given that, when the
writing is about something about which we know little, we have to be
concerned about the importance (it was 150 miles, after all) as
presented as being the important ones and overlooking what really
matters (not paying attention to flying the airplane, not being in
radio contact,).

My guess is these two pilots are going to be restricted to looking out
the side windows of any future airplane they may be in, and won't have
to worry about yokes interfering with their laptops.