The laptops that triggered two Northwest Airlines pilots to fly 91 minutes without talking to the ground may be relatively new technology, but distractions in the cockpit have led to accidents and incidents since the dawn of aviation.
As lawmakers and federal regulators called this week for banning laptops and certain other electronic devices in airline cockpits, experts who study why pilots make mistakes said the problem may be much more fundamental: People don't multitask very well.
Distractions ranging from a disgruntled passenger to a burned-out light bulb have been behind scores of crashes, according to federal accident reports and researchers.
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"This has been recognized for decades now," said John Lauber, a former NASA researcher in human behavior who also served as a member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The pilots on Northwest Flight 188, which initially flew past its destination of Minneapolis on Oct. 21, told the NTSB that they were working on a new airline-issued computer program and didn't realize they had flown so far without talking to air-traffic controllers.
Distractions have been involved in numerous other airline accidents. The distractions range from frivolous conversations to pilots becoming overwhelmed by regular duties. Examples:
• On Dec. 28, 1978, 10 people died when a United Airlines jet ran out of fuel and crashed in Portland. The pilots were so focused on diagnosing a problem with the landing gear that they forgot to monitor their fuel, the NTSB found.
• On Aug. 27, 2006, pilots on a Comair regional jet tried to take off from a dark, closed runway in Lexington, Ky. The runway was too short, and the jet hit trees and burst into flames, killing 49 of the 50 people aboard. The NTSB concluded that the pilots' conversation about seeking other jobs contributed to the error.
Though he could not comment on the Northwest pilots, Key Dismukes, a NASA aviation researcher in human behavior, said that increasingly automated aircraft make distractions a potentially greater problem. Modern jets can fly for hours without any input from pilots, making distractions seem less critical.
"It's not astonishing to me at all that people get absorbed in a task and lose track of time and where they are," Dismukes said.
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