Their tale just doesn’t fly.
Experts aren’t buying two pilots’ claims that a “heated discussion over airline policy” made them block out 74 minutes of desperate radio messages, screeching alarms and banging on the cabin door as panicked ground crews prepared to scramble fighter jets to help bring down their out-of-contact flight.
Instead, investigators are trying to find out if the two were snoozing at the controls of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 as it cruised 150 miles past its destination Wednesday.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. Air traffic controllers, crews of other planes and even a flight attendant onboard tried desperately to rouse the silent fliers — pilot Timothy Cheney and first officer Richard Cole — as they flew at 37,000 feet over Minneapolis, where it was supposed to land, and into Wisconsin.
Finally the attendant got a response through an onboard intercom.
The pilots told authorities they were deep in discussion about airline policy, a conversation that got so heated that they lost track of where they were and failed to hear urgent attempts to contact them.
But National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said investigators were looking at fatigue as a possible cause of jet’s radio silence.
They seized cockpit recorders in the hope the devices will reveal if the pilots were fighting, or snoring.
Yesterday, Cole denied that he and Cheney were hijacked by the sandman.
“All I’m saying is we were not asleep; we were not having a fight; there was nothing serious going on in the cockpit that would threaten the people in the back at all,” he said.
The Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 carrying 147 passengers from San Diego lost contact with controllers after passing over the Rocky Mountains at 7 p.m. Central time, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said.
“We tried to contact them but couldn’t get anyone,” she said.
The silence continued until 8:14 p.m. when the pilots realized they were over Eau Claire, Wis. By that time, the Air National Guard was preparing to launch four jets from two bases.
None of the passengers knew anything was wrong until the flight landed, when cops and FBI agents stormed aboard.
“They implied it was just a business-as-usual delay,” said passenger Lonnie Heidtke.
Investigators yesterday doubted the recorders would shed light on what happened. The machines fitted into Flight 188 hold only 30 minutes of recordings.
Officials said both pilots passed a breathalyzer test.