NTSB to answer questions about wayward NWA flight

The National Transportation Board (NTSB) said this morning that it will be releasing information this afternoon. It also said the flight attendants who were on board are being interviewed in Minnesota today.

Asked what would be released today, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said: "I can say that we will provide an update to the ongoing investigation. It may answer some of the outstanding questions."

On Sunday, federal investigators questioned the captain and first officer of the flight, which overshot its destination by 150 miles and was out of radio contact for 75 minutes. The plane was flying from San Diego to Minneapolis-St. Paul on Wednesday.

The pilots of Northwest flight 188, Capt. Timothy B. Cheney, 53, of Gig Harbor, Wash., and First Officer Richard I. Cole, 54, of Salem, Ore., were interviewed in the Minneapolis area.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Cheney and Cole told investigators that they lost track of time and location -- but didn't go to sleep -- when they didn't respond to air-traffic controllers for more than an hour. The newspaper's website cited people familiar with the crew's statements.

During a session with a team from the NTSB, the Journal reported, the cockpit crew recounted the same sequence of events it had given airline superiors: They became distracted in conversation while cruising at 37,000 feet and didn't realize how long the plane had lost radio contact as they flew over Eau Claire, Wis.

While some aviation experts have speculated that the pilots were napping, officials at Delta Air Lines said privately that they were skeptical that the two men had been asleep.

The pilots had a layover of about 17 hours in San Diego, airline employees pointed out, and while staying alert is a problem at some hours of the day, the idea that both could fall asleep on a flight that was not a red-eye did not seem likely.

Even so, the Journal reported, government investigators are pressing to see whether fatigue might have played a role in the flight, which had 149 people aboard.

The pilots haven't given any detailed public account, but the crew told authorities right after the flight they were distracted during a heated discussion over airline policy, according to the NTSB.

One Delta pilot on Sunday told the New York Times that the hot topic of discussion in the cockpits of the company's planes lately had been the integration of procedures between Delta and Northwest Airlines. Delta is standardizing its checklists and procedures, mostly by imposing its operating rules on the Northwest pilots, and this has given the Northwest pilots a lot of new information to absorb, the Delta pilot said.

Northwest Airlines is cooperating and conducting its own internal investigation, said Chris Kelly, a spokesman for Delta.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and staff writers Heron Marquez Estrada contributed to this report.

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