Stray jet's pilots were on laptops

[jdc]

dochocson wrote:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look out to the right of the aircraft, you can see my career and that of my co-pilot plummeting to earth in a fiery ball of stupid"

LOL! nice on‌e =)

[chopper]

I'm not buying any of it. This whole situation shows how immediate reporting by a kneejerk media serves no one. Oh, I guess they weren't sleeping, or drunk, or arguing. Sorry about all those previous stories --but thanks for the page views.

[ka jowct]

I have to fly on Northwest in about 2 weeks. This story does not inspire confidence.

[Drew]

ka jowct wrote:
I have to fly on Northwest in about 2 weeks. This story does not inspire confidence.

I'm flying Northwest across the cold, dark, Pacific in a couple of weeks. I'm going to ask the FAs to check on them every 15 minutes.

[RgrF]

Drew wrote:
[quote=ka jowct]
I have to fly on Northwest in about 2 weeks. This story does not inspire confidence.

I'm flying Northwest across the cold, dark, Pacific in a couple of weeks. I'm going to ask the FAs to check on them every 15 minutes.
Won't help if your pair is drunk rather than oblivious.

[Mac-A-Matic]

IIRC - pilots don't do much actual "flying" nowadays anyway. Especially over vast expanses like the Pacific. They set the autopilot and kinda just oversee things.

If they really were on their laptops, I'm guessing they were Airbus pilots since Boeing jets have the yoke between their legs and it seems harder to set a laptop on your lap with the yoke in the way. Airbus have the yokes to the left or right of the pilots, making it easy to play WoW on the laptops.

I fly all the time and I don't worry about it. Can't get too worked up over the notion of plunging into the ocean in a ball of flames since I can't do anything about it anyway!

[decay]

make them go to this site:
http://www.didyouwatchporn.com/

[Doc]

Allegedly, Delta (which now owns Northwest) ordered all pilots to abandon their old scheduling software and replace it with Delta's undecipherable web-app to register their availability for assignments and receive work-schedules.

Northwest had a similar app before the acquisition, but it was supposedly very easy and intuitive where Delta's was... less so.

The software doesn't just help a pilot choose a schedule, it assigns schedules based on obscure rules and does not necessarily respect seniority, sleep-schedules or where the pilot's home-city is.

With that in mind, put yourself in the position of the pilot and copilot trying to figure out how to not get screwed out of the best routes and flight-schedule by the unfamiliar software and it's probably a little easier to sympathize with their intensity of focus on the problem.

OTOH, I'd still like to see them fired for ignoring messages from ground control and for BOTH using their laptops at the same time.

[Carnos Jax]

Mac-A-Matic wrote: IIRC - pilots don't do much actual "flying" nowadays anyway. Especially over vast expanses like the Pacific. They set the autopilot and kinda just oversee things.

If they really were on their laptops, I'm guessing they were Airbus pilots...

Correctomundo! Plus, the laptop story only augments the "heated discussion" one. I can easily see them having a heated discussion, pulling up data on the laptops, etc. Not saying that is the actually story, but currently there's no evidence to support any hypothesis we all may propose. And of all that I've heard, they're almost all equally plausible...therefore it's difficult to even apply Occam's razor to this one.

[lafinfil]

Maybe they were trying to get MS Flight Simulator X to load under Windows 7