You Are Feeling Very Sleepy...

So, via all the usual sources, I hear that an airliner flew right past its intended airport. The airliner was in fact out of radio contact for over an hour, and once air traffic control raised the pilots, "his answers were so vague that controllers feared the plane might have been hijacked." The pilots say that they weren't asleep, just "engaged in a heated debate about airline policies."

I am not a pilot, but in a past life I used to stand watches on ships. I will admit that occasionally I lost some situational awareness. One instance where a ship suddenly appeared in front of me out of a fog bank comes to mind. (We were in no danger, but the other ship was closer than I thought it would be.)

None of these instances were during a debate, heated or otherwise. They were during very quiet and uneventful watches. I didn't fall asleep, but the sheer monotony of the watch had lulled me and several other watchstanders into not paying too much attention.

I'd be willing to bet that something similar happened at first during this flight. The conversation died off, and the cockpit got quiet.

Then both the pilots fell asleep.

Apparently, the flight attendants didn't notice that the flight wasn't descending when it should have, or if they did notice, didn't take quick action.

Now, the usual nattering nabobs of the media are going to natter on, but here's a simple fact. The act of traveling will screw with your sleep cycle. Also, any one of a thousand events unrelated to travel can affect the sleep cycle. Not only that, but the human mind, faced with a lack of stimulus, will tend to shut off, AKA "sleep."

People who operate vehicles that are largely autonomous can and will drift off from time to time. This is not a new fact - trains come with a dead man's switch not because engineers drop dead but because they fall asleep. In that case, the safest thing to do is stop the train. Obviously, on an airplane that would be a Really Bad Idea, but a loud buzzer that sounds after X number of minutes unless the pilot does something would work.

I'm not saying that something like this should be installed on aircraft. But in all the media nattering that will follow, bear this in mind - lack of stimulus can cause humans to not pay attention.

From a science fictional perspective, this lack of stimulus could be a real problem for long-endurance space flights. In the wonderful book Ice Bound, the author Jerri Nielsen talks about "the stares." This is a phenomenon for over-wintering crew in Antarctica where they tend to space out for extended periods of time - not actually asleep, but not aware either.

I have no great and profound conclusion to this little essay, other than to point out that this kind of not paying attention is a very human phenomenon, and one not easily fixed.