So they overshot the airport. Big deal.

Another loser of situational awareness (Image by Nationaal Archief via Flickr)

I sympathize with the pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles. It’s so easy to get distracted and forget what you’re supposed to be doing in today’s busy world. Besides, they’re probably overworked or something.

One time in a car I got into an argument with a passenger about whether Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles directed The Third Man (turned out it was Carol Reed) and I drove past Syracuse and ended up in Cleveland. Couldn’t that happen to any of us?

Cleveland wasn’t so bad. I thought it would be a lot worse than it actually was.

And anyway, don’t all airports pretty much look alike? And not just from the sky, either.

The pilots may have been in “a heated discussion over airline policy,” according to the news reports. If so, there will probably be a new airline policy issued forbidding pilots to argue about airline policy. But it’s also possible they may have missed Minneapolis because they fell asleep. (The poor devils haven’t been given the full third degree yet so there are conflicting reports.)

Well, that’s understandable, too. I once fell asleep while reading an article in the New York Review of Books that claimed that the Byzantine Empire is misunderstood and I missed an episode of The Sopranos. Fortunately, I was able to catch a rerun a few days later. Similarly, Minneapolis was still there when the pilots finished napping. If, in fact, they were napping. So no damage was done and the passengers got to be interviewed by TV news after they landed.

Whatever the cause, we do know that the pilots “lost situational awareness,” to use their phrase. Who among us has never lost situational awareness? How many times have you woken up in a room you don’t recognize, lying next to a person you don’t recognize? I’m guessing dozens of times. Losing situational awareness is such a common problem in our society that the New York Times Style section is almost certainly cooking up a long feature story on it right now. I hope I don’t miss it but in all frankness, I don’t read the Style section much.

As wayward-flight stories go, I liked this one much better than the boy who hid in the attic while his father’s home-made balloon flew about and I’d very much like to see more like it.