As more details come to light, the tale of the Airliner That Went Too Far less resembles the amusing portrait of bungling pilots that late-night TV comedians have created. In fact, the breakdown in communications revealed a system still easily breached for another 9/11-style aircraft attack.
From start to finish, the one-hour-and-17-minute incident is a tutorial on how terrorists could exploit human errors that supposedly were eliminated by post-9/11 fixes.
The pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 188, who were stripped of licenses after unconvincing claims that they were preoccupied on laptop computers, flew 150 miles beyond their Minneapolis destination.
Subsequently, the National Transportation Safety Board also found that FAA controllers failed to promptly notify the Domestic Events Network for possible military response when contact was lost, FAA controllers couldn't determine the last radio frequency used by the pilots, a hotline phone to the military was located distant from the Minneapolis supervisor's position and the flight's captain waved off a flight attendant's intercom alert about the flight being overdue—he told her he was "hosed," whatever that meant.
Such a string of foul-ups in the air and ground hardly instill confidence that the FAA and airline crews have done their best in tightening air security since 9/11.
Instead of testing security procedures at airport passenger gates, the FAA should shift some of its concerns to its own air and ground operations to end failures that allowed a subsonic jet to wander out of touch over U.S. cities long enough to theoretically destroy skyscrapers.
