Update: The Airplane Tapes May Not Have Much to Tell Us

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Michael Isikoff

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Mark Hosenball

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The CIA on Trial

8:23 PM, November 13, 2009 | Comments (11)

By Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, and Mark Hosenball Earlier this year, when justice Department prosecutors began trying to assemble a case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, Attorney...

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7:00 AM, October 19, 2009 | Comments (2)

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Mark Hosenball

Federal safety investigators have confirmed that the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles only has a 30-minute recording capability. This means that the recorder will not supply investigators looking into the flight’s strange circumstances with a complete audio record of what happened in the course of 78 minutes during which Flight 188 was out of voice contact with air-traffic controllers during its journey last Wednesday evening from San Diego to Minneapolis-St. Paul. The voice recorder, along with the plane’s flight data recorder, were delivered Friday afternoon to the Washington laboratory of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident.

As Declassified reported earlier today, investigators looking into why Flight 188’s crew were out of voice contact with controllers for more than an hour as they cruised cross-country are baffled by the explanations that so far have been offered about the incident. According to a source familiar with air-traffic-control communications, the crew simply stopped talking with controllers on the ground as it was flying at 37,000 feet somewhere near Goodland in the far west of Kansas. The crew did not resume voice contact with ground controllers until they were somewhere near Eau Claire, Wisc., well east of Minneapolis-St. Paul. During the crew’s 78 minutes of being incommunicado, controllers made extensive efforts to raise the them on the radio and also contacted the airline—which has its own circuits for communicating with flight crews—as well as trying to send text messages. After the plane passed over the Minneapolis area, said the source (who asked for anonymity when discussing the continuing investigation), the Federal Aviation Administration, mindful of the lessons of 9/11, got in touch with military authorities, who reportedly put fighter aircraft on alert. When the Flight 188 crew finally resumed voice contact with the ground, the source said, controllers asked what had happened. “You know what? We were distracted,” was the crew’s reply. When they repeated the question, controllers got a similar answer. When a supervisor pressed the controllers to again grill the crew about what had happened, the crew told controllers they were “discussing a company issue … that’s all I can say,” according to the source. Viewing the answers as uninformative, if not suspicious, controllers initially worried that the plane might have been captured by hijackers and ordered the aircraft to make a series of unusual turns. When the pilots complied without hesitation, controllers concluded that the pilots really were in control of the flight and eventually directed it toward Minneapolis-St Paul, where other flights were held up so that Northwest 188 could make a priority landing.

Investigators say the crew’s initial assertions that they were discussing a “company issue” are hard to swallow, since it’s difficult to believe such a discussion could have distracted them from critical duties—like talking to air-traffic control—for more than an hour. Investigators were hoping the plane’s voice recorder would have captured everything that went on in the cockpit during the missing 78 minutes, and are disappointed the recorder only had a 30-minute recording capability. One theory already being discussed among experts is that perhaps the pilots fell asleep, and, upon awakening, and knowing that the voice recorder only had a 30 minute capacity, decided to fly around for a while so that the recorder would erase evidence of what went on. Delta Airlines, which owns Northwest, issued a statement saying that the pilots of Flight 188 had “been relieved from active flying pending the completion of these investigations.”