Originally Posted by
freezingflyboy
My point was that any number of things could have taken place and an aircraft or a controller missing a radio call is NOT uncommon. They obviously figured out something was wrong and handled the situation in a relatively timely fashion. Would you have rather they saw the airport out the side of the aircraft, just hung it all out and come screaming down from FL210? Sometimes the best course of action is no action, at least immediately. Just take a minute, figure out what you screwed up and fix it. So while it may appear that they weren't doing anything (so of course they must have been sleeping, especially since it's Mesa
) the crew may have, in fact, been working through the problem in a calm, collected fashion.
--25 min with lack of communication isn't dealing with something in a calm, collected fashion.
--An aircraft missing controller calls for almost a half hour IS uncommon which is why the FAA is looking into it.
-- If it was radio communication failure then they should have followed AVEF and still landed with no issues. You don't go flying around for 25min without talking to anyone without squawking a code.
--If there was an emergency that they were dealing with for that length of time then the FAA should already know about it and not be investigating to see if they were sleeping or not. The FAA said they are investigating them sleeping. The reporters didn't just jump out there and make the accusation. So any belief that these guys were sleeping is well founded.
--Even if they forgot to switch frequencies or didn't hear ATC something should have popped into their mind when when looked out the window and saw the airport go by while still in cruise. Maybe they need acars to received messages when they aren't paying attention.
Looking at the pictures of their flight track I'd guess they had everything programmed in except for the approach and when it passed it's last fix, the airport, it went into HDG mode. Of course I haven't flown on the CRJ but it seems logical.