Slumber Land

As "Experts Puzzle over How Flight Overshot Airport" in the case of the Northwest flight to Minneapolis that lost contact with airport traffic controllers after Denver and traveled one hundred fifty miles past its destination before communication was resumed in Wisconsin. Many believe that the pilots fell asleep, and from IT safety expert Markku Häkkinen, who has done research on auditory warning systems in airplanes, I learned that having pilots nod off is more common than many travelers would like to believe.

In a posting called "Siren's Song," I described some of Häkkinen's work, but over dinner at the ISCRAM conference I learned that he has also compiled studies about sound systems for waking up pilots. The challenge for companies like Alertness Solutions, of course, is how to create a wake-up signal that encourages alertness rather than sense-overwhelming confusion. And, obviously, an alarm loud enough to be heard in the cabin might panic passengers. Besides, as Häkkinen points out, sometimes we actually tune out alarms in the higher volume ranges. Apparently, according to Häkkinen, some researchers are experimenting with having the voice of a loved one be programmed into the cockpit, should a wake-up call be needed.

Update: CNN reports that the "stray jet's pilots were on laptops," which may intensify current debates about balancing responsibilities to passengers with access to ubiquitous computing technologies in a complex attention economy that has already been at issue in train and metro transportation. Now the New York Times says that an impromptu tutorial about the scheduling system being implemented after the Northwest-Delta merger on a laptop was to blame.