Distracted pilots en vogue last week.
Not one of the aircraft involved in the incident. Not same type either. (Photo by Fernando Montalvo for Velozia Air)
It seems flying an aircraft is not as exhilarating as non-pilots think it is and may be so downright boring these days that staying alert in the cabin could be almost impossible (maybe all the automation?). Most of you know about the Northwest Airlines flight crew that overshot their destination last week, presumably because they were using their laptops (maybe playing Microsoft’s Flight Simulator). Lucky for the passengers, the rest of the crew (the flight attendants) were still on duty and knocked on the cabin door, ending the in-flight internet café saga and resulting in a 180° turn back to the airport and into the hands of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigators. Not to be outdone, two planes came less than 100 feet of colliding with each other at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Sunday (October 25, 2009) in California. Turns out a possibly distracted crew of a Midwest Airlines’ Embraer 190 jet may be to blame for the 2:50 PM PDT incident which also involved a Northwest Airlines jet.
Midwest Airlines flight 1503 from Milwaukee, Wisconsin had just landed at one of LAX’s runways and, as it taxied back to the terminal, controllers had asked the pilot to hold short of a parallel runway so Northwest’s flight 623, a Boeing 757, could depart on its way to Honolulu. According to reports, the Midwest crew acknowledged the order, but failed to comply with it and began to cross the runway in use by the Northwest plane. An air traffic controller immediately ordered the Midwest plane to stop and disaster was averted. Hundreds of people would have probably been killed in the collision. Some witnesses say the planes came as close as 15 feet from each other, while the FAA will only confirm that the distance was less than 100 feet and they are looking into determining just how close this close-call was.
Some of LAX’s taxiways had just been equipped with runway stop bar lights which indicate when a pilot cannot cross into an active runway, but, according to reports, the lighting system was not installed at the incident intersection.
In all likelihood, the incident occurred because of an in-cabin distraction, whether flight related or not. The FAA is investigating and I’m sure we will know soon enough what happened (hopefully, the pilots weren’t logging off their laptops). It is possible one of the pilots acknowledged the command, but another crewman was at the controls and failed to listen in on the conversation. I actually made this mistake myself in the 90s while on my first Cessna 172 flight (see HERE for that story).
Of course, this incident reminds those in the aviation world of the Tenerife airport accident back in 1977 (Canary Islands, Spain) in which two Boeing 747s collided after a communications misunderstanding. That accident killed 583 people, the highest toll in an aviation accident. An accident between the Embraer 190 and the Boeing 757 would not have been as deadly, but it would have been just as troubling and tragic. Of course, and passengers don’t like to hear this, runway incursions are a lot more common than many passengers even imagine. This one, though, was a lot closer than most.
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