Saturday, October 24, 2009

Lost in Space

The bizarro story of the week was two pilots on a commercial airplan overshooting Minneapolis airport by 150 miles before turning around and landing safely. They were out of touch with ground control for over an hour.

What gets me is this: ground control tried numerous times to contact the pilots, including sending them text messages, but were unable to get their attention. Putting aside the question of what happened -- whether the pilots were asleep or distracted by an argument or just doing something innocuous that they can't go into -- why doesn't ground control have the ability to make a really loud noise in the cockpit? There's something in the cockpit that says "TRAFFIC!" loudly when the plane gets too near another plane. Why doesn't ground control have a button they can press to say "HEY DUMMIES, PAY ATTENTION TO US!" when necessary?

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