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"The co-pilot called it an innocuous mistake," reported CBS' Bob Orr. And quite right he is too. Granted, the Northwest Airlines flight did land an hour late. Granted, it burned 150 miles worth of extra fuel. Granted, the cockpit crew violated procedure by ignoring radio calls and e-mail alerts. Still. No harm, no foul.
The network newscasts could not let go. All three assigned a correspondent to the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board at which both pilots testified that they were distracted by a study of the new flight schedules imposed after Delta took over Northwest. CBS' Orr depicted them with "their headsets off and their noses buried in laptop computers." ABC's Lisa Stark reported on their testimony: "They were not sleeping; they were not dozing; they were not having an argument; but they were distracted." Trying to make the crew's behavior more consequential than it was, NBC's Tom Costello invoked the 72 people who died in a jetliner crash in North Carolina because of a distracted cockpit crew. Sure enough, it was a horrible tale--but it happened in 1974 to the now-defunct Eastern Airlines and the pilots were discussing the merits of the pardon of Richard Nixon.
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