Saturday, October 24, 2009

What's going on with NW/DL?

Just a little curious on what's going on with our friends at Northwest and Delta.  Last week, a DL 767 Flight 60 landed on the taxi-way at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport instead of the Runway. I'm not sure how seasoned pilots can miss the two, white lights are highlighting the runway, when blue lights outline the taxi-way.  Just bizarre.

Now, this week, a NW Airlines flight 188 overshot the entire airport by at least 150 miles. This one is probably being looked at a little more because there was complete radio silence for over 70 minutes.  This is not good. Pilots are to remain alert and listen to their call signs from Air Traffic Control for descending information and prepare for landing.

I can't imagine what the ATC controllers were thinking when there was no radio contact.  That is why they were given a series of maneuvers to do to ensure that the pilots were in command of the aircraft and not someone else.

It's way too late for any type of pilot action for the merger talks because they are already a merged airline.  In fact, this weekend NW Flight numbers are going away and we'll only be seeing DL flight numbers.  Thankfully, nothing went wrong with either of these incidents, but both could have been worse than what they were.