Pilots Fired After Caught Sleeping Mid-Flight

this is Northwest flight 188 an Airbus A320 flying from San Diego to Minneapolis on what should be a standard 4-Hour flight but for the last 80 minutes Air Traffic Control has been calling them without a response now sometimes it happens while we're flying along that we get out of the range of the controllers when they're supposed to pass us on to another frequency and we can't hear them anymore there's a term for it when you've lost radio communications we call it Nordo which is technically no radio which is not actually the right word for it no radio like the old plan that didn't have any radio that was a Nordo uh but we call it going Nordo when you lose radio communications and what happens in that scenario is that somebody from a nearby plane will call you and air traffic control will use that plane as a relay to get the message to you or you can pick them up on a frequency which we monitor most of the time called guard something you'll typically notice when you get onto the flight deck of a commercial airliner is that they'll have this frequency in standby on the second second radio 121 dimal 5 now Technically when we're flying we're supposed to be listening to two frequencies one frequency is the one that we're communicating with air traffic control with and this second frequency guard we use to monitor emergencies if if that's a thing you can hear if there's been a a plane crash you'll hear an alarm going off so you can relay that information to air traffic control and then you can use it in case you get out of range of air traffic control now what I do is I have the main frequency that I'm talking on up louder and then I have guard 121 decimal 5 up at like half volume and the reason why I do that is so when I hear somebody talking to me my aircraft I can tell which frequency they're talking on if it sounds at a normal frequency I know they're talking to me on the number one radio if it sounds kind of soft I know it's on the number two radio so I know where to reply to the person that's talking on so that's a trick I learned back in the day and I still use it now now that is what guard is supposed to be used for but in the US some Pilots don't listen to it because on the radio you'll hear people making cat noises like this you're on guard now I'm not the guard police we actually have one airline that has self- designated themsel to Monitor and police that frequency but uh that is not my Airline so I don't have to do that the guard frequency usually overseas you will never hear people meowing or using it for any other reason when you're crossing the ocean you'll be able to monitor that frequency and people will use it in some cases to find out what's going on with weather or things like that but usually there's another frequency which we monitor for crossing the ocean so that guard frequency really you should just be listening to it in the case that you lose your radio or you're out of radio range or there's an emergency that's what it's used for but the controllers regardless of where you're at will be able to communicate to you on that frequency if you're out of range of their normal radio they can call and look on the screen of where you're at call that control controller say hey come up on guard and call these guys and tell them to come up on your frequency I wasn't able to pass them off to you so the controllers would call you on guard you would hear your call sign and go oh okay they're they're looking for me and that's how you're really never out of radio contact but back here on flight 188 these Pilots obviously weren't listening to guard because air traffic control hasn't been able to reach them for over an hour at the start of this audio the flight attendants had just called to ask how long they were from landing and that triggers them to make this call to air traffic control Northwest 188 188 Minneapolis Center go ahead Roger we distracted and we have overflown Minneapolis we our overhead oon would like to make a 180 and arrival 188 R turn to the right to heading of one z z be radar vors set you up there holding there and um we'll see if we can't get you in okay copy right to anding well you have to give him some credit for not being lost one of the worst things that can happen to you as a pilot is lose your overall situational awareness meaning you don't know where you're at in space and these Pilots obviously knew where they were at let me show you on the map this is the great state of Minnesota and they were aiming to go here in Minneapolis but they're actually over here near oair and since they were coming from the West they overshot it a bit now I don't know what the weather conditions are like but one of the first things that comes in my mind when I hear you're going to have to hold which he says right here 188 rer and turn to the right to heading a one Z there be radar vectors set up there holding there and um we'll see if we can't get you end but they've overflown their destination and now they have to hold so my first thought is going to be fuel how much fuel do I need in order to safely get on the ground and what's the weather like which I don't really know cuz this was a long time ago of course these controllers are going to wonder what's been going on with these Pilots so here they're going to follow up and find out what happened in North 28 heading 1 z0 the radar vectors for your descent also and the clear to Minneapolis radar vectors ping one z z for Cle and then CLE arrival okay arrival Norwest 18 188 Center um you up on 3375 okay 3375 18 no stay right here 12372 2372 for now and I'll have the over that arrival SE here in just a moment you can stay right here and um I'm Miss freeny and I just have to verify that it is secure it is weed we were remember how I talked about earlier sometimes Air Traffic Control will use a group of Pilots to relay a message to another plane because they think they're out of range and that's why they're not hearing them I think that's what happened when this female pilot checked in with him 188 you up on 3375 of course these controllers are asking if the pilots are okay if they're in control of the aircraft because this is after 9/11 so they didn't make sure that everything's okay in a lot of cases if you've not talked to air traffic control for that long of a period of time fighter jets are going to get sent up in the air to come look and see what's going on what's Happening is the plane safe are the pilots awake they're going to do some things to wake the pilots up and they're going to call them and they have their own procedures of things they're going to do which I'm not going to talk about in this video but they're going to make sure the pilots if they are sleeping wake up so if you ever look out your window and see something like a fighter jet flying outside it's possible your Pilots fell asleep however if the pilots were to lose their radios and are out of radio contact because their radio let's say they spill something on in the radio stopped working which has happened we do have a way to transmit to air traffic control hey everything is fine but our radio is not working and they can see exactly what we're doing and everything and they'll they'll know from that code that we set up hey everything's fine with the plane but they're having some radio issues and that's totally fine that's not a big deal at all but these Pilots did neither of those things they said they were distracted it is we got distracted we were of course air traffic control is not just going to take oh you were distracted for the last hour and a half like that's a long time to put it in perspective let's say 5 to 10 minutes that could be that could happen all the time you could be thinking you're on a frequency uh You' gotten a hand off from somebody else you can still hear people talking on the radio but no one had said your name so you just kind of ignored it that happens five or 10 minutes that's not a big deal 15 would be a little bit long if it gets longer than 20 and you don't hear anybody talking about anything and you haven't heard your call sign come up on the guard frequency a lot of times what pilots will do is they'll just key up the mic and say like anyone there and the controllers will say yeah we're still here it's just quiet and we're doing that because we think man maybe we lost contact or something's wrong because it's just so quiet during during Co it was like that we were flying around just be one of the only planes in the sky and we're flying around and you don't hear anything it was really eerie but a lot of times guys would would key up on the frequency and go like still there because it's weird so you want to make sure you're still in radio contact so that's what will happen after a while but after an hour if you haven't heard your call sign you you know there's been a problem here's what happens next 188 how much Fu do you [Applause] have 188 you have time to give a PR explanation on what happened i88 uh is there any way you can elaborate on the distraction we're just with some compan issues here and that's all was that's all I can say right now this time record I'm guessing air traffic control keeps asking them about what's going on hoping that these Pilots are going to hang themselves probably because the military and some of the big bosses up in the FAA are telling these controllers find out what was actually going on normally they're not going to be asking you those types of questions unless you have an emergency or a fire and they don't have that situation they may also just be trying to verify that these Pilots are actually the pilots and not somebody that has bad intention I don't know but these Pilots are being smart if you will about not hanging themselves there is a cockpit voice recorder as most of you will know and that cockpit voice recorder records everything however it records over itself it's used in the case of an accident so it will keep recording until there's some type of an impact this plane landed safely so that there was no impact nobody died but when that impact that's when it stops recording so it will keep recording over itself so they know the longer the flight is the easier everything's going to be because there won't be any information on the cockpit voice recorder and most Pilots know this rule buried very deep in the rule books on page 764 information obtained from the record is used to assist in determining the cause of accidents or occurrences in connection with the investigation under part 8:30 the administrator does not use the cockpit voice recorder record in any civil penalty or certificate action essentially what that means is if you're talking badly about your boss and it's caught on that recording they can't use that in any way to penalize you that's basically what it comes down to however the FAA doesn't really care because at the end of the day they can do whatever they want and if you're not flying the plane safely it doesn't matter what the cockpit voice recorder says you haven't checked in for an hour and a half and that's what's happening with these guys they're trying to get that information because now you haven't talked on the radio for a while everybody's involved and you got a lot of attention on you and you don't want to be flying with everybody paying a lot of attention to you and who you are and what's going on you want to be under the radar you want to do your whole career and have nobody know who you are that's the key so these Pilots said they weren't doing this sleeping they said they were working on their schedules now in some countries Pilots are allowed to take controlled rest they don't call it naps or sleeping they just call it controlled rest but the FAA doesn't allow that I think that being a guy that does a lot of Long Haul and flying in the backside of the clock in the middle of the night getting an extra 15 or 20 minutes of of rest while you're there in the seat makes sense to me as long as the other person is there and awake and stays awake and they have been some recent changes to mitigate these risks everything in aviation what we do is we look at hey this is a risk and flying all night is a risk even though this flight was not all night but flying all night for me is definitely a risk so we have things that are set up in place to prevent that risk from becoming a real big problem like sleeping for 80 minutes this fa document says although a number of foreign air carriers authorize inseat cockpit naps during the flight the FAA does not authorize such inseat cockpit naps now the interesting thing to keep in mind with this is they don't want someone up there while the other person isn't there to monitor them however on a freighter if I'm sitting in the seat there by myself while the other pilot gets up goes to the bathroom puts a food in uh starts doing the coffee they could be gone for 10 or 15 minutes and I'm just up there doing all the stuff by myself while that person is doing all those other things going to the bathroom getting some food making some coffee that could easily take 10 or 15 minutes so is there a real difference between that and me sleeping there for 15 minutes or them sleeping there for 15 minutes which would help them be more alert and more awake and be safe while they're flying no I don't really think so however I don't get to make the rules I'm just out there flying the jet so those are the rules that we have to follow until the FAA says hey we now think cockpit naps or whatever they call all them are okay so you can do it in that case you can do it and what's funny is earlier in that exact same document they say it's beneficial for restoring both performance and alert levels especially during long periods of wakefulness but rules are rules so you don't do it what I do is I turn on all the lights that are on the flight deck at night I turn on all the lights so that way it's nice and bright and it makes it not a sleeping environment I have had people where what they do is they dim all the lights and they get it real dark and then they'll turn the heat up get it all warm and I say like look man I'm like a glass of milk and a cookie away from just being useless to you and sleeping for the next 4 hours so I say if you want to make it all dim that's fine but if you you're going to hear me sleeping in like 10 minutes so then they'll turn on the lights and turn up everything bright it's just that's just not going to work for me you can't make everything dim in the middle of the night while I'm tired and then go like oh yeah this is so nice that that's never going to work and I think that's dumb so I mitigate that risk by turning all the lights on and that helps me to stay awake the other thing is they have this crew alerting system now whereas if you're not touching anything if you're not turning on the radio or touching something on the control panel if you're not doing any of those things after a certain amount of time you get a message and it looks like this once we see this we have just a few minutes to respond if we don't respond within a few minutes then it turns into something like a fire alarm noise and I had some Pilots once do that I was in The Galley just making food I was on break but they just wanted to see what would happen and they took it to that fire alarm Norse and and I heard I came running up there and my heart was just racing cuz I thought something really bad has happened because we're in cruise over the ocean and they were just like oh yeah we saw that new thing we just want to see what happened which kind of what pilots do so they just wanted to see what was going to happen so now the planes have mitigated the risk with that so between lights and just knowing how to handle your rest thing now the the manufacturers have put this in there so that way Pilots if they do fall asleep which look it's human you're you could have an8 hour flight it could be just two people you could be doing it over the middle of the night across the ocean nobody's talking to you it can happen and if you don't respond and you both happen to fall asleep which would obviously be a problem then you have your plane will wake you up so there's just a mitigation of the risk that way as well now according to this report both Pilots ended up getting their licenses removed which means the airline can't keep them there as pilots and TR it's kind of sad because I'm sure these Pilots have probably had a very good career and they've maybe never made any mistakes but that's one of the things about being a pilot they don't let you make any mistakes you make one big mistake and that's it and that's the way it works in the world of being a pilot there's a lot of Glory but there's a lot of pressure as well if you do something stupid like fall asleep even though it was just an honest mistake and I'm not saying that these Pilots fell asleep but they didn't respond for 80 minutes so whatever it was that they were doing they could have been watching a movie and totally been having a great time up there but you're not doing what you were supposed to be doing which was flying the plane so regardless of whatever it is you made one mistake and sometimes one mistake is all it takes and everything's over for your career Pilots can after that then go reapply get their licenses and try to get hired by another airline and they can go through this big process it it's happened I I know a guy that that happened to they they lost all their licenses cuz they made a pretty big mistake they had to go redo all their licenses and then reapply this happened in 2009 and 2009 10 11 no no Airlines were hiring it was a terrible time in aviation really hard to get a job so having something like that on your record when there's thousands of Pilots literally fighting for every single job then these guys are going to have a really hard time getting a job really anywhere for a few more years probably about 2016 it started to pick up and obviously now it's it's crazy so if you ever do look out your window and you see a bunch of fighter jets flying with your plane your Pilots probably aren't asleep but you are part of an air show I look forward to hearing from you until then keep the blue side up

Channel: 74 Gear

Views: 836,071

Keywords: pilot, airline pilot, 747 pilot, 74 gear, pilot Kelsey

Id: lLHAbmXL7_8

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023