Sailor

Perhaps WE should ban salaries for these worthless public serpents, I mean servants !!!

flynwmn

as a guy who married into a North Dakota farm family you do know Dorgan isn't leaving anytime soon. Right?. More of my in laws then pilots in ND.`

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Unwanted unpaid vacation

detpilot

Hell, why not ban eating, too? And just make sterile cockpit for the entire flight, because, you know, none of us can handle conversation AND not missing our airport. And ban looking outside for anything but hazards to flight- no point getting distracted by the scenery. Great job, congress....

wags3539

I know everybody is just mad at the premise of this whole debate, and I agree, this should not be an act of Congress, but does anybody actually think this will change anything. I mean seriously I'm about 99.99% certain that laptop use is prohibited at every airline (obviously with the exception of EFBs/manuals, etc...) So whether Congress mandates the change or just your company manual, what's the difference, it's prohibited either way. Yet this still manages to happen regardless. My only fear in this is that this is opening up the floodgates for congress' knee-jerk reactions rather than allowing the FAA to be the regulatory body in all this. We can only hope that this is all that comes out of this.

emb145captain

And of course the really silly part of all of this is the fact that this legislation is a result of two clowns who obviously lied and were sleeping. Anybody who believes the "laptop" excuse apparently wasn't aware of the first lie that they "were in a heated discussion". Once a liar always a liar. These jerks should never fly again just for all the grief the rest of us awake pilots have had to endure.

I use my laptop all the time in the cockpit. And will continue to do so. It is a third source of JeppView besides our tablets.

Keeps me awake!

DornierPilot

First of all, I'm willing to admit that it could happen to any of us, but wouldn't it be a shame that Congress gets involved legislating something that potentially didn't even happen. Is it possible that this crew fell asleep and the legal asked them "what happened?". A plausible explanation was provided that didn't involve direct violation of an FAR (sleeping on duty), in order to keep their certificates.

End result - crew still loses their certs & job over this and everyone left behind in the industry has to deal with another difficult to implement/enforce law from people that have no business making such. In other words, the proposed law is a direct resort of a cover story that may or may not have even taken place. It sucks for them and also for the rest of us.

I've always been of the thought that the FAA really just needs to use their "Careless and Reckless" catchall and not micromanage the "distraction" question. Professional crews need to use whatever tools they can in order to maintain SA and manage their own personal sleep state. When we screw up, we need to deal with it.

New laws from Congress are completely unnecessary, but we all know that the political world will always take advantage of "low hanging fruit" for their own personal gain. It's easy to use the media to propagate simple concepts to the masses such as "no _________ while in cruise flight, etc." It sounds good, seems like a good idea to the uninformed and gets them the all important face time that is coveted.

As an aside, I always have gotten a giggle out of the "I only read aircraft manuals, etc. in cruise" crowd. I don't understand how reading the words in aircraft manuals is not distracting and reading other things is distracting? Must just be me. Next thing they'll want to legislate (in addition to no eating or drinking during cruise) is no daydreaming in cruise. I've found that to be quite distracting at times

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the increase in safety after Congress gets done telling all of us how to operate our aircraft.

Cheers!