FAA Chief: Pilots Must Refocus On Professionalism

JOAN LOWY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot Minneapolis are part of a larger problem — eroding professionalism among commercial airline pilots, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Randy Babbitt said Wednesday.

Babbitt told an international aviation club on Wednesday that aviation is facing an "extreme need to refocus on professionalism." He cited two examples: Northwest Flight 188, which overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles last month, and a regional airliner that crashed earlier this year near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people.

The two Northwest pilots — Capt. Timothy Cheney, 53, of Gig Harbor, Wash., and First Officer, Richard Cole, 54, of Salem, Ore. — told the National Transportation Safety Board they lost track of time and place while working on crew scheduling on their laptops. Air traffic controllers and the airline's dispatchers were unable to communicate with the plane for 91 minutes, raising national security concerns.

In the Buffalo crash, testimony at an NTSB hearing in May indicated the pilots made a series of critical errors just before the plane experienced an aerodynamic stall and plunged to the ground.

A former airline pilot and pilots union president, Babbitt said that in both cases the pilots forgot their first job was to focus on flying the plane.