In the wake of an Oct. 22 incident in which two Northwest Airlines pilots overshot their destination by 150 miles because they were distracted by their laptop use, Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota (over which the mishap occurred) called for a federal ban on personal laptops in the flight deck. While Franken equated the laptop use to texting while driving, such a comparison is not applicable for commercial airline flight. Furthermore, federal measures to target cockpit PC use don’t do anything to address the fundamental roots of pilot distraction.
The texting-while driving analogy, while useful in drumming up support for potential legislation, lacks much grounding in reality. While driving a car on any type of road requires the nearly constant attention of the driver, a modern commercial aircraft at cruising altitude only requires occasional monitoring of the flight instruments. Things get a bit more involved during takeoff/climb and descent/landing, or an in-flight emergency. Ultimately, Franken’s analogy misrepresents the situation.
That’s not to say that the pilots’ actions were at all excusable: the pilots were acting against airline policy, which strictly forbids activities that are not essential to the flight of the aircraft. Of course rules are rules, but the reality is different. Pilots frequently take crossword puzzles, books, magazines and other distractions into the cockpit. Frankly I can’t blame them. Expecting two people to be engaged in no other activities than that pertaining to flight for six hours is inviting trouble. That being said, airlines should find ways to ensure that pilots are safely monitoring flight controls and not focusing on their technological gadgets.
But a federal ban on personal electronics would do little to improve safety. Pilots would merely switch to other types of diversions, as they have done in the past, such as printed media or just plain heated conversation. Even if you were to hypothetically strip search all pilots before they took to the skies and confiscate any forbidden materials, the risk of distraction wouldn’t be completely eliminated. In 2008, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that two pilots fell asleep in the cockpit when their plane overshot their destination in Hawaii. Allegations of other such fatigue incidents indicate that the problem may occur with some frequency.
Rather than dictating such flight deck policies to airlines, which may have their own ways of dealing with pilot fatigue and concentration, the federal government should instead focus its efforts on facilitating better training for pilots on monitoring essential flight systems. If history is any indicator, legislation alone may simply turn the rare computer-using pilot into a napping pilot.
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