Yawn… while flying?

Nap time!  Yay!  Wait, NO!

   On October 23, 2009 flight 188 took flight from San Diego, CA to Minneapolis, MN.  But at 6:56 pm, controllers in Denver and Minneapolis were unable to reach the airplane which had 147 passengers on board.  At approximately 8:00 p.m., the plane flew over Minneapolis and kept flying for another 150 miles until it reached Eau Claire, WI.  The pilots noticed they had gone too far.  At 8:14 p.m., the cockpit re-established radio contact and requested permission to land in Minneapolis after they had turned around.  The pilots said that they were arguing and “lost situational awareness”. 

   The NTSB(national transportation safety board) is conducting an investigation.  Delta North West said that it is cooperating with federal investigators and is conducting it’s own search.  Plus, the pilots have been relieved of active flying, pending the completion of the investigation.  Using the cockpit voice and flight data recorder(complicated electronic thingies that tell you what happened on the flight), they will be able to tell whether the pilots were really arguing or if they had fallen asleep.  But safety officials find it very hard to believe that two professional  pilots lose their awareness because of an argument.  Actually,  for an hour and twenty minutes, they were working on their schedules on their laptops.

   This is not the first time pilots have fallen asleep in the cockpit.  From what I can find, the first time this happened was in 1986.  This flight carried about 248 soldiers.  In this 1986 case, pilots were pushed to the point of exhaustion and fell asleep in the cockpit.  This plane crashed and killed all 248 soldiers.  Since then, pilots have fallen asleep approximately 53 times.

   I don’t understand.  Correct me if Im wrong but a pilot is allowed to work 16 hours without break while a truck driver is only alowed to work 11 hours without a break.  Plus, truck drivers can pull over for a break.  You can’t pull over 10,000 ft in the air(Well, you could, but that would create a huge problem).  So we shouldn’t be mad at the pilots;  we should be mad at whomever made that law.