Did Pilots Fall Asleep? FAA Opens Investigation of go! Flight 1002.
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.21.08 | 12:24 PM ET
The go! flight from Honolulu to Hilo last week overshot the airport by 15 miles, then backtracked and landed safely. The Federal Aviation Administration—and presumably everyone else who flies—wants to know how it could have happened. Anderson Cooper has an interesting theory: It’s all about the exclamation mark in go! airlines.
“I’m always wary of any company that has an exclamation mark in their name,” he said on his CNN show last night. He continued his riff: “[R]emember, when you see an exclamation mark…be afraid. Be wary.”
If the pilots did fall asleep, of course, it’s no joking matter. From the Honolulu Star-Bulletin: “A source close to the investigation said there was a 25-minute period where ground crews in Hilo could not get a hold of the flight crew.”
Yikes.
Related on World Hum:
* Captain ‘No Name’ Dishes on the State of Air Travel
* The Cult of United’s ‘Channel 9’
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Evelyn 02.21.08 | 9:02 PM ET
Something similar happened many years ago, when the pilots on a major airline, can’t recall which one, fell asleep and overshot LAX. After an investigation, the entire crew, flight attendants included, was fired. Shouldn’t there be some kind of alarm that air traffic controllers can activate to wake up pilots if they fall asleep?
donald 02.22.08 | 12:35 AM ET
I was in the Air Force pre-Viet Nam as a back-end crew member. We had our share of excitement…we got chased by Migs, but didn’t get caught; we experienced poor officers; we had other than smooth flights.
But, we never had the level of incompetence that would allow a flight crew to fall asleep at the controls. That is not a dismissal offense. It is a prosecutable crime. If the crew did fall asleep, they should GO! directly to jail.
capn_curmudgeon 03.05.08 | 1:50 PM ET
NASA’s recent flight crew fatigue studies have been largely ignored by the FAA and airlines as a whole. Staffing airplanes with properly rested flight crews would cost the industry way too much money. Corporate practice has always been to put safety well behind profits. A few more incidents like the one in Hilo, combined with hull and passenger losses will cause real change to come about in the typically glacial manner that it does in the industry.