Northwest Pilots Case: a Barrel of Laughs

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The Case of the Northwest Pilots keeps getting funnier and funnier.

Of course, it wouldn't be one bit amusing if it had happened to me, but as Woody Allen once said, when I get a hangnail, it's tragedy; when you fall down the stairs, it's comedy. Or maybe it wasn't Woody Allen. Maybe it was Paul Allen. Or Herb. Sorry. Just thinking about those two in the cockpit doing... what was it they were doing?... makes my mind wander.

As you know, original speculation was that the pilots were taking their semi-approved staggered naps simultaneously. This made sense to me. Flying one of those big planes is almost as boring as running a business meeting.

Once the thing is up in the air, you set the automatic controls, lean back and wait for it to be over. It's my estimate that fully 63% of all business people have at one time or another copped a parcel of Z's when the gears of the machine were grinding. Why shouldn't pilots? Okay, I can think of a lot of reasons why not and I'm sure you can too. But the idea that these guys slept through their wake-up alarm and allowed their enormous vehicle to drift over the landing zone didn't seem far-fetched.

Yesterday I heard that the somnolence theory has now been supplanted by the story that the two were cruising the web and lost track of the time. This summons up a couple of images to my mind. I'm thinking they weren't just Googling. I'm willing to bet that if they were online, it was some kind of World of Warcraft thing.