Douglas Corrigan, born in Galveston, Texas in 1907, was determined by his late teens to become a pilot. He did, and then spent a good part of the 1920s barnstorming around America with his own small aircraft, offering rides at $2.50 a flight for folks at county and state fairs.
Corrigan was also qualified as an aircraft mechanic, and manged to pick up a fair amount of work with various start-up carriers, principally in California.
But as the story goes, Corrigan always had a hankering to embark on a solo flight across the Atlantic, and was doubly inspired when Charles Lindberg accomplished that very exploit – remarkable for the era – in 1927. But for one reason or another, frequently bearing upon the refusal of aviation regulators at the time to grant Corrigan permission for a trans-Atlantic effort, he didn’t get a chance to emulate Lindberg.
That all changed on July 17th, 1938, though, when Corrigan took off from New York on a properly sanctioned flight to Los Angeles – and ended up 28 hours and 13 minutes later in Ireland. He explained to incredulous aviation authorities that his compass had gone wonky and had instructed him he was flying west to LA, when in fact his little craft was droning steadily east, across the Atlantic.
But why, asked the regulatory mavens, had he not occasionally glanced at the ground? That would surely have alerted him at once to the fact he actually wasn’t over terra firma, i.e. the United States, but instead over water, i.e. the ocean.
A most reasonable question, said Corrigan, which can be put to rest by describing to you the impenetrable fog which enveloped my entire flight, thus denying to me even a brief glimpse of ground, or water, or anything else. Only the errant compass was in view. “And that,” said Douglas Corrigan then, and forever after until his death in 1995, “is my story.”
It was a story wholeheartedly embraced by an America starving for humor, longing for respite from the debilitating grasp of the Great Depression. Nobody really believed the tale, but they certainly had great fun with it. After Corrigan returned to the United States on August 4th – by steamship, incidentally – he was given a ticker tape parade through Manhattan with a million people happily looking on, and the next day the New York Post fashioned a blaring headline which read “NAGIRROC YAW GNORW OT LIAH.” If that line looks all backwards, it is, but put it in front of a mirror and you’ll see it reads “HAIL TO WRONG WAY CORRIGAN.”
If Corrigan was sticking to his story, the nickname stuck too, and Wrong Way Corrigan is now firmly enshrined as the architect of one of the marvellous sagas of early aviation.
With that, let me introduce a fresh pair of Wrong Ways named Timothy Cheney and Richard Cole. The difference between them and Corrigan is that their bizarre airborne episode is anything but amusing, and in fact raises a good many questions about pilot fatigue, mainly, but also cockpit distractions, inattentiveness, carelessness and when all is said and done, loss of aircraft control.
Cheney and Cole are (were) the Northwest Airlines pilots who took off in an A320 Airbus from San Diego last week, bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul, and then proceeded to overfly MSP by roughly an hour and 150 miles.
I assume, without fear of contradiction, that everyone who settles into a commercial airliner these days does so with the unwavering conviction that if nothing else, the two or perhaps three pilots up in the front end will be alert, aware, concentrating, conscious, and above all monitoring the flight, even if modern jets essentially fly themselves.
Cheney and Cole have abruptly brought that assumption to ground, so to speak, because for whatever reason they managed to not be alert, aware, concentrating, and conscious, and so flew right over the bright lights of Minneapolis-St. Paul and then continued east, half way across Wisconsin.
To repeat: the jet flew on for an unscheduled hour, or slightly less, and 150 miles while air traffic control and Northwest Airlines dispatch frantically attempted to establish radio contact. No response, nothing, which quickly led to a nagging worry on the ground that the flight had been hijacked.
With that possibility in mind, the United States Air Force was placed on alert for a potential interception: an advisory was sent to the White House: and all the while a $50 million dollar jet, with 144 passengers and five crew members on board, flew over and past MSP in utter silence.
Eventually, Cheney and Cole reacted to the incessant radio traffic from below, turned the jet around, and in due course landed. As soon as the doors opened, MSP airport police and officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were all over the plane, and Cheney and Cole, with one pressing question: what the hell happened?
Ah, yes said Cheney and Cole; what happened? Well you see it was this way, and on they went to fashion a yarn about how they’d been discussing Northwest Airlines corporate policy, had their personal laptops out to examine certain details of said policy so they could then debate them in greater depth, and so they guessed they’d probably just “lost situational awareness” for a while up there, because their conversation was pretty intense, even heated at times, and y’know, well, I guess we just kind of didn’t pay quite enough attention for a bit.
Apart from “lost situational awareness” as a euphemism for either losing or abandoning control of a jet, there’s not an aviation expert or commercial pilot on earth who for one second buys Cheney and Cole’s line of malarkey. Their unanimous opinion, based on the evidence, is that both these characters nodded off on the flight deck, were soon sleeping like babies at 37,000 feet and 550 miles an hour and were so dead to the world they heard nothing from the sophisticated array of communications equipment found on any current jetliner.
For what it’s worth, the FAA has revoked the pilot’s licences of both Cheney and Cole. So presuming the experts are correct, and these two were indeed slumbering, here’s the issue: this wasn’t the first time. There’ve been several examples, among them a jet flying to Hilo International in Hawaii a year and a half ago. The aircraft remained straight and level at 21,000 feet, overshot the airport, and continued on out over the Pacific Ocean with no contact from the flight crew. They eventually came to, reversed course and landed, but the subsequent investigation verified the two pilots had been comfortably dozing.
Generally speaking, there are around 3,000 commerical planes in the air over North America during peak flight hours. That’s 6,000 pilots and first officers, and likely several hundred more because a good many older generation jets have three-person crews. Given those numbers, airlines now have some work to do to persuade me, and I suspect a whole lot of other people, that pilot napping isn’t a significant safety issue.
The industry response, I’m guessing, would be that sleeping in the cockpit occurs so infrequently that it’s really of no consequence, and at any rate no cause for excessive worry because after all, these new generation aircraft are just about as fail-safe as they can be.
Sorry, but that’s not good enough. Airline crews have to be as fail-safe as they can be, too – which in my view would mean they need as an essential ingredient of flight duty to be awake all the time. My concern is how many cases of pilot napping have there been that we don’t know about? And worse, how many the airlines themselves don’t know about, because crews kept quiet, didn’t tell?
Just asking. I wouldn’t be, though, were it not for Tim Cheney and Richard Cole, late of Northwest Airlines. And as a final point, back to Wrong Way Corrigan. His trans-Atlantic flight was a stunt: he knew exactly where he was going, but In the context of commercial aviation in 2009, I haven’t the slightest doubt Wrong Way would find nothing Right about this, at all.
The original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune remains one of my favorite games of all time on the PS3. The story was highly entertaining, the graphics were stunning, and the controls precise. Needless to say I, along with many other gamers out there, had pretty high expectations for Uncharted 2, especially after seeing the breathtaking demos at E3 this year. Finally after months of waiting Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is out. I can happily tell you it exceeds all expectations, easily making it one of the best games out so far this year.