The Federal Aviation Administration has opened an investigation into whether two go! airlines pilots fell asleep during a flight from Honolulu to Hilo last Wednesday.

go! Flight 1002 was headed for Hilo Airport around 10 a.m. but overshot the airport by 15 miles before returning to land safely…

Air traffic controllers, which had been tracking the plane by radar, were unable to reach the plane for 25 minutes, according to a report by KGMB-TV.

They keep going and going and going…




  1. Greg Allen says:

    It should be standard policy to assure that at least one pilot is always awake — like sentry guards in the military.

    That being said…

    I totally get this. The plane is on autopilot and gently droning away — it’s a perfect formula for falling asleep.

  2. ¢ says:

    That is a 40 minute flight!

    ¢

  3. McCullough says:

    Apparently, this is becoming routine.

    http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=14494

  4. eyeofthetiger says:

    Maybe one pilot dropped some change and the other one was helping him look for it.

  5. Froggmann says:

    I wonder if that’s what happened to that contental flight I was last week comming into John Wayne Airport (SNA). It was 90* and 5 miles off target when it finally did a hard bank into the private plane flight path then performed a overfly of the airport.

    It was an odd experiance to say the least to see an airliner that low and banking that hard.

  6. bobbo says:

    In my experience, the odds of two pilots both being that sleepy is quite remote.

    In my experience, more likely, maybe even most likely, they had been out partying the night before and in fact they had both passed out from too much to drink and not enough sleep.

    In my experience, this can be confirmed by checking the crew roster for the flight attendant performance.

    and no, I have never done this, in my experience.

  7. MikeR says:

    #6 – You mean they didn’t follow the 12 hour ‘bottle to throttle’ rule??

  8. bobbo says:

    #7–the 12 hour rule is scrupulously followed, but when you are drunk to begin with, you get confused about zulu time and just what time zone you were in when you started drinking, finished drinking, and – – – “where are those throttles now?”==always a clue.

  9. AdmFubar says:

    lets try the more logical situation, the company they work for doesnt follow the rules regarding time off between flights for crews. bet they were pulling a double shift. scary.. just think about it….. how well have you performed after working overtime or double overtime.. …

  10. bobbo says:

    #9–I’d bet the opposite because crew hours have a paper trail that is easy for the FAA to follow. As is too often true–the trouble is completely within defective rules that are followed to the letter. Crews are totally legal and totally fagged out when a scheduled flight is canceled, so a 12 hour wait period is imposed before they can fly–ie–go to hotel to sleep and rest up==but if the flight is canceled 10 hours after you got up, then you are clear to fly after being up for 22 hours and you have just gotten sleepy enough for bed===but thats how the system is set up, legally.

  11. Jetfire says:

    I say screw the Pilots and just make all the Planes remote controlled like UAVs. The autopilot does most of the work now anyway.

    #9
    “lets try the more logical situation” Someone forgot to set the Alarm Clock correctly.

  12. TomB says:

    11:

    Should something go wrong, I would much prefer to have a pilot in the nose of the plane trying to save his hairy ass than some pimply faced kid sitting in an air conditioned office somewhere trying to save mine.

    I’m not trying to say UAV pilots aren’t any good. It’s just that adrenaline and the survival instinct are fantastic life savers 🙂

  13. Rick Cain says:

    They probably were too busy watching the stewardess strip. Probably that same french chick from French Airline AOM that does a great cockpit one girl show….


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