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FAA Comes To Colo. For Flight 188 Investigation

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Nov 4, 2009 5:57 pm US/Mountain

FAA Comes To Colo. For Flight 188 Investigation

 CBS News Interactive: Industry Turbulence

LONGMONT, Colo. (CBS4) ― Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board were at the Denver Regional Air Traffic Control Center in Longmont on Wednesday as part of their investigation into the Northwest flight that overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles.

The FAA also checked with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs as part of the investigation.

En route to Minneapolis, Northwest flight 188 passed through airspace controlled by the Denver Regional Air Traffic Control Center. When it lost contact with the flight, procedure dictates that NORAD is to be notified.

It was 7:06 p.m. Mountain Time when NORAD was notified by the FAA, making it more than an hour the plane was out of radio contact.

"The controllers should have notified NORAD more quickly that the plane was not responding," the FAA administrator Randy Babbitt said in a prepared statement.

The contact is done through what is called the Domestic Events Network, a hotline maintained through various airspace security agencies. Last contact with the flight was at 5:46 p.m. Mountain Time; 10 minutes later at 5:56 p.m., Denver controllers tried to hand off the plane to the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, but there was no response from the plane.

The FAA told CBS4 that not until 7:06 p.m. was NORAD contacted. Eight minutes later, at 7:14 p.m., contact with the flight was re-established. By then Operation Noble Eagle was used to put NORAD fighters on alert to be scrambled. It's a procedure set up immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11.

Fighters were ready to take off from two locations in proximity to Minneapolis, but were held back once radio contact with the Northwest flight was resumed. Had the planes been dispatched more timely, they could have flown up alongside the Northwest cockpit and tried to make visual contact with the pilots inside.

Investigators from the NTSB and the FAA interviewed controllers, supervisors and listened to the tapes, trying to figure out why NORAD wasn't contacted sooner.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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