Northwest Flight 188 had, because of reasons yet to be confirmed, recently overshot its Minneapolis destination by nearly 150 miles. The then pilots, first officer Richard Cole of Salem, and flight captain Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, have come forward with the confession that they were, in what is clearly a violation of company policy, using their laptops to go over schedules in the cockpit. All this was happening while clearly alarmed air traffic controllers were trying to establish contact with the plane fearing the worst.

The sequence of events, as given by the pilots onboard, combined inappropriate use of laptops with a badly timed bathroom break and a chat session in the cockpit with a flight attendant. All this caused them to fall out of radio contact with the controllers for nearly an hour. All during this time, the pilots had everyone worrying that the plane may have been hijacked.

While National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration investigators are trying to come up with more possible theories of what might have happened, including one which says that the pilots might have dozed off, the airline's officials completely believe the version put forward by the pilots.

The infamous incident has managed to make a place for itself in the list of examples offered for lax cockpit discipline and pilot complacency, counted among the biggest safety hazards of the current times when flying is so frequent.