I get what you're saying; if, say they were in the middle of a 4 hour flight. but they were too close to their intended destination for their attention to wander

I thought that pilots had to keep monitoring the condition of the aircraft, checking their position, airspeed, and altitude both by the instrumentation and by good old fashioned seat of the pants reckoning throughout the flight regardless of what the autopilot was told to do. Flying is all about redundancies for the redundancies.

Those system checks are computerized and constantly monitored, in auto-pilot or not. When an alarm goes off they have a bigass book to look up what to do about it, if they don't know. There are hundreds of things that can set off an alarm, some serious, many not so much, but should be logged to check at the next stop or next scheduled service.

"I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with 's'."

"Sky".

They must have had head phones on their laptops playing some mean online games and lost track of time... and space. Idiots.

Still some pretty conflicting info coming out about what really went on in the COCKpit. The only thing not conflicting is that they are now DNIF.

This overflight is minor compared to another event the same week by the same airline:
Washington subway crash

Aren't they one and the same incident?

Yes but the one is minor.

No, the other is the landing on the taxiway, instead of the runway, in Rio.

Just thinking about this.

The pilots seem to be coming up with implausible stories to avoid admitting they were asleep.

I don't care, and in fact the excuses seem worse to me than merely sleeping.

How could you spend an hour and twenty minutes (possibly more - that is just the "overshoot" time - had they been asleep earlier?) discussing rostering and checking stuff on computers, and not once come back to the matter at hand and check where you were. If that is true it scares me more than two tired pilots on long shifts just dozing off.

But regardless, I don't really care if they were asleep, arguing, or gang-banging the flight attendants, they were in charge of a plane full of people and they weren't paying proper attention to what they were supposed to be doing. These excuses aren't worth a damn, even if they are true.

I'm still waiting to hear how this was Bush's fault . . .:eyebrow:

Well after 9/11 pilots were forced to spend long hours waiting for clearance and security checks which makes them tired. And the new security checks deterred people from becoming pilots, leading to overwork and further fatigue. Then, by maintaining the War on Drugs he deprived them of cocaine and speed which would have prevented this whole thing.

Really, Classic, it isn't that hard. Everything is Bush's fault.

No, it's Reagan's fault... air traffic controllers.

This was not two pilots who always flew together. Pilots and co-pilots constantly fly with different partners. These two were probably doing what was routine when any other NW pilot was their partner. Only these two got caught in a mistake.

Apparently it is routine for pilots to take short naps, read a book, work on a laptop, etc. since everything is automated and since they are now locked up in a compartment without any other distractions.

He was at the controls. It was a bush pilot. :D