There are two months left in the year, but let's go ahead and declare the co-winners of the 2009 Worst Job Performance Award in the category of Not Doing Their Jobs, Not Even Close. This year's trophy goes to the two easily distracted Northwest Airlines pilots, Stan and Oliver, who forgot Lesson 2 of flying school: While getting the plane off the ground is important, the job's technically not finished until you land the plane.
If you weren't afraid of flying before, this would be a good time to start.
It was the second bizarre aeronautics-based story this fall. The first was the Balloon Boy Hoax. The Balloon Boy parents faked that their son was on a homemade helium balloon that floated across Colorado. Hoping for a little publicity to help sell the idea of them starring in a reality TV show as that Whacky Science Family, this stunt instead caused an international panic for the child's safety that played out on live television and mobilized numerous rescue workers.
If trying to get a reality TV show was an actual occupation, the entire Balloon Boy Hoax family would have been in contention for the 2009 Worst Job Performance Award.
The award, though, went hands-down to the two pilots, Bud and Lou, who overshot Minneapolis by an FAA record-setting 150 miles before taking a U-turn in Wisconsin then heading back to Minnesota, where they initially claimed, "That's the way our Garmin sent us." Which no one believed. Had they said Google maps sent them that way, then we might have thought, "Yeah, that's probably how it happened."
In the meantime, while the plane was in the air and not in contact with anyone on the ground for 90 minutes, the White House was informed of a possible situation, military fighter jets were preparing to take off to intercept the plane, and everyone wondered, as my son Christopher did, why anyone would hijack a plane going to Minneapolis? To do what, take it to Canada? As if Minnesota isn't Canadian enough already?
After the Garmin excuse and a quarrel excuse that lasted a minute, the two pilots, Jerry and Dean, settled on perhaps the lamest excuse they could come up with: That they lost track of time while working on crew schedules on their laptops.
Working on their laptops? Really? Is anyone buying this? Something else must be going on in the cockpits of commercial jets? Porn, sex, sleep, online gambling, cooking classes, alien abductions, Call to Duty, any of these reasons would be more believable than they were working on their laptops and lost track of time. Excel spreadsheets are not that engrossing.
