Airline Pilots did WHAT?

Hasn't this just been an interesting week for Northwest Airlines. A flight that overshot the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles and over an hour of no communication with the pilots. Huh. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/27/airliner.fly.by/index.html 2 fighter jets were prepped ready to go get this flight. They were fueled & sitting on the tarmac for the 'go' signal. First thoughts were that the pilots had fallen asleep. There's a comforting thought. Actually, any excuse the 2 pilots would give in this scenario are just plain freaky. Yesterday the result was that they were using laptop computers, against policy, and lost track of time. These guys, today, lost their licenses.

You know - in the world that is post-9/11, my thought is: why weren't those fighter jets released after 15 minutes of zero communication? Think about it - if another plane is, heaven-forbid, taken by terrorists - wouldn't you want those fighters on your side within minutes & not over an hour later when some unthinkable thing could have happened? Granted, they still may not be able to do a darn thing about it - but STILL.

So let's say they would have released the fighters & this still was the scenario - the pilots were on their laptops. I think the U.S. government could & should then charge the airline for the time & supplies spent for the mission. The airline can then bill the pilots - sounds good to me. A government money-maker based on the idiot civilian pilots that are out there.

You know, I do understand that people are people & that we all make mistakes. And these 2 guys had clean flight records with a combined 30,000 hours of flight time in. But you know what? In their job, it's completely inexcusable. There ARE jobs like that, and they had one of those.