Federal investigators struggled to determine what the crew members of a Northwest Airlines jetliner were doing at 37,000 feet (11,000 meters) as they sped 240 km past their destination and military jets readied to chase them. Unfortunately, the cockpit voice recorder may not tell the tale. A report released late Friday said the pilots passed breathalyzer tests and were apologetic after Wednesday night's amazing odyssey. Authorities said the pilots told them they had been having a heated discussion about airline policy. But aviation safety experts and other pilots were frankly skeptical they could have become so consumed with shoptalk that they forgot to land an airplane carrying 144 passengers. The most likely possibility, they said, is that the pilots simply fell asleep somewhere along their route from San Diego to Minneapolis. “It certainly is a plausible explanation,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the two pilots, first officer Richard I. Cole, said that wasn't the case. He also said an argument wasn't to blame. “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 told The Associated Press in an interview at his home in Salem, Oregon. He declined to discuss what exactly happened but did insist “it was not a serious event, from a safety issue.” “I can't go into it, but it was innocuous.” New recorders retain as much as two hours of cockpit conversation and other noise, but the older model aboard Northwest's Flight 188 includes just the last 30 minutes – only the very end of Wednesday night's flight after the pilots realized their error over Wisconsin and were heading back to Minneapolis. They had flown through the night with no response as air traffic controllers in two states and pilots of other planes over a wide swath of the mid-continent tried to get their attention by radio, data message and cell phone. On the ground, concerned officials alerted National Guard jets to go after the airliner from two locations, though none of the military planes got off the runway.
