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The National Transportation Safety board may never know what was going on in the cockpit of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 as it flew past its destination in Minneapolis towards Eau Claire. "The cockpit voice recorder caught just the last 30 minutes of the flight. By that time it was likely just routine communication about landing," ABC's Lisa Stark explained. While the plane was incommunicado, CBS' Wyatt Andrews told us, air traffic controllers in Minneapolis "watched with building tension, their post-9/11 training telling them to presume the worst, disabled pilots or even terrorism…four National Guard F-16s were put on standby." Even when radio contact was restored "the pilots were put through a series of maneuvers in the air to prove to controlers they had command of the aircraft," noted NBC's Kevin Tibbles.
ABC's Stark aired a soundbite from pilot Richard Cole. "I tell you this: neither of us was asleep." Such reassurance did not deter John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream), her network's in-house aviation consultant, from demanding "immediately, under emergency authority," that the Federal Aviation Administration authorize pilots to take "naps in the cockpit under a controled environment." Nance was clearly distraught. He called the pilots "outrageously irresponsible" and their loss of situational awareness "outrageous behavior." He even took the plane's equipment personally: "I am really upset that this is only the 30-minute older version of the flight cockpit voice recorder. We were hoping it was a two-hour one."
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