Cockpit

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NEW YORK - Minutes after a JetBlue flight took off from New York for Las Vegas, the pilot began muttering things that didn't make sense to his co-pilot. He started talking about the need to "focus," lamented that "things just don't matter," and yelled at air traffic controllers to keep quiet. At some point, Capt. Clayton Osbon purportedly told his first officer that "we're not going to Las Vegas" and launched into a sermon. That set off a chain of events that culminated in a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew being filed against Osbon on Wednesday, a day after he was tackled by passengers at 35,000 feet and later carried off to a hospital.

Federal authorities on Wednesday charged a Jet Blue pilot whose midair meltdown on a New York-to-Las Vegas flight forced his co-pilot to lock him out of the cockpit and make an emergency landing while passengers restrained the distraught captain. The pilot, Clayton Osbon, was charged with interfering with a flight crew by the U.S. attorney in Amarillo, Texas, where the plane made its emergency landing, the Associated Press and Amarillo.com reported. A Jet Blue spokeswoman, Sharon Jones, told The Times that Osbon, who lives in Georgia but is based in New York City, had been taken off duty pending an investigation into Tuesday's incident on Flight 191. The airline refused to comment on whether Osbon would continue to receive his salary during the suspension, but Jones said that "he is still employed with Jet Blue.

White-knuckle airline passengers who are already shaken by news that two Northwest Airline pilots are under investigation for overshooting a Minneapolis airport after possibly nodding off, won't want to hear this: Some pilots say cockpit catnaps happen. "Pilots on occasion do take controlled naps," said Barry Schiff, an aviation safety consultant and retired TWA pilot. "So this is not without precedent." Although the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits pilots from catching a few z's in the cockpit, several airline pilots say they are surprised such napping mishaps haven't happened more often, considering longer work schedules for pilots and advances in aviation that make planes easier to fly. The issue of cockpit siestas came under scrutiny this week after the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board announced they were looking into why Northwest Flight 188, from San Diego to Minneapolis, overshot its airport by 150 miles before turning around.

NEW YORK - Minutes after a JetBlue flight took off from New York for Las Vegas, the pilot began muttering things that didn't make sense to his co-pilot. He started talking about the need to "focus," lamented that "things just don't matter," and yelled at air traffic controllers to keep quiet. At some point, Capt. Clayton Osbon purportedly told his first officer that "we're not going to Las Vegas" and launched into a sermon. That set off a chain of events that culminated in a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew being filed against Osbon on Wednesday, a day after he was tackled by passengers at 35,000 feet and later carried off to a hospital.

The attorney general of Kenya has decided not to prosecute a mentally ill college student who nearly crashed a jumbo jet carrying 398 people in December, saying guilty intent could not be proved because Paul Mukoni, 27, was suffering from a mental illness when he burst into the cockpit and struggled with crew members. Doctors say Mukoni, a Kenyan, is suffering from acute paranoia.

A flight mechanic stole a private Learjet from Virginia on Wednesday and took it on a 1,600-mile joyride to Denver, then killed himself as authorities approached, officials said. Mike Christiansen, 24, was found dead at the controls moments after he was talked through a landing at Stapleton International Airport, authorities said. They said he was not a licensed pilot. They said they did not know why Christiansen, who was alone in the plane, killed himself or where he got the gun.

The Federal Aviation Administration criticized Delta Air Lines on Friday, saying an inspection disclosed widespread problems with crew coordination, poor communications and "lapses of discipline" in the cockpit. The FAA said in a report that Delta's "lack of clear-cut" management guidance to pilots was largely responsible for shortcomings found during a five-week review of the carrier's flight operations.

A mysterious "faint noise" abruptly ended the cockpit recording of the final moments of Pan Am Flight 103, with normal conversation among the crew before that indicating nothing was wrong up until the jumbo jet broke up in the sky and crashed, officials said today. "There is nothing in the conversations (of the flight crew) to indicate anything was wrong," said Paul McKie, Department of Transport spokesman. "There is a faint noise at the end which needs a bit more analysis.

A Jet Blue pilot who began ranting and acting erratically as his flight headed from New York to Las Vegas -- forcing the co-pilot to lock him out of the cockpit and make an emergency landing -- has been described as a seemingly content family man who once hoped to be an astronaut. Jet Blue identified the pilot as Clayton Osbon, who lives in Georgia but who maintains an apartment in the New York City borough of Queens because his flying base is New York. In a statement Tuesday night , it said that the captain of Flight 191 was receiving medical treatment.

Istarted flying small airplanes when I was 18, and after I got out of the service, I used my GI Bill money to adorn my pilot's license with a Lear Jet rating. Most of the training consisted of takeoffs and landings at Bakersfield; we never climbed above 10,000 feet or went very fast. But at the end of the course we made a real flight -- to Las Vegas and back -- and I finally got to climb to something like a jet's cruising altitude and experience something like a jet's speed. The cockpit of a Lear Jet -- these were old Model 24s, the jet equivalent of a '55 Chevy -- was a tight place, with a steeply slanted windshield grazing your forehead, a tall instrument panel in front of you and a console projecting back between the seats.

The first officer of the Northwest Airlines jet that missed its destination by 150 miles said he and the captain were not sleeping or arguing in the cockpit, but he wouldn't explain their lapse in response and the detour. "It was not a serious event, from a safety issue," pilot Richard Cole said late Friday at home in Salem, Ore. "I would tell you more, but I've already told you way too much." Air traffic controllers and pilots had tried for more than an hour Wednesday night to contact the Twin Cities-bound flight.

White-knuckle airline passengers who are already shaken by news that two Northwest Airline pilots are under investigation for overshooting a Minneapolis airport after possibly nodding off, won't want to hear this: Some pilots say cockpit catnaps happen. "Pilots on occasion do take controlled naps," said Barry Schiff, an aviation safety consultant and retired TWA pilot. "So this is not without precedent." Although the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits pilots from catching a few z's in the cockpit, several airline pilots say they are surprised such napping mishaps haven't happened more often, considering longer work schedules for pilots and advances in aviation that make planes easier to fly. The issue of cockpit siestas came under scrutiny this week after the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board announced they were looking into why Northwest Flight 188, from San Diego to Minneapolis, overshot its airport by 150 miles before turning around.

The sight of airline cabin crews trying to mollify enraged passengers has become all too common. But a recent Air India flight added a twist when crew members mid-flight started punching each other in front of startled passengers. Accounts of what happened differ now that everyone's back on the ground. Exactly who started the brawl and why got a bit lost in the clouds, though one flight attendant has accused a crew member of trying to molest her. What no one disputes is that with New Delhi-bound Flight IC-844 cruising at 30,000 feet over Pakistan around 4 a.m. Saturday, the cockpit and cabin crews broke into fisticuffs.

"It is like going for a ride in a convertible in the sky," Chris Prevost tells tourists considering a flight in his open-cockpit, 1940-era biplane. In the last 30 years, he has flown thousands of passengers above the picturesque vineyards of the Sonoma Valley and along the Pacific coastline. Scott "Scooter" Sibson flies tourists in a biplane over the spectacular red rock canyons and landscape of Sedona, Ariz., and he compares each trip to "riding a Harley-Davidson with wings." Both men are among a small group of pilots in the United States who combine their love of flying vintage aircraft with the business of taking adventurous tourists for flight-seeing rides over awe-inspiring terrain.

With a gunman brandishing a pistol behind him, the exhausted pilot still on board a hijacked TWA jetliner told reporters "we'd all be dead men" if a rescue is attempted. Capt. John L. Testrake and two remaining crewmen on the grounded Boeing 727 talked with three ABC reporters on the sixth day of a crisis that left 37 other American hostages under the guns of Shia Muslims in secret locations in Beirut.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Monday rejected another request by suspected Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson to throw out the 25-year-old bombing conspiracy indictment against her. Olson's defense lawyers had argued in a motion filed earlier this month that the indictment was unfair because Latinos were inadequately represented on the 1976 grand jury that approved it. Judge Larry Paul Fidler told defense lawyer Steffan Imhoff...

The copilot in February's airline crash that killed 50 people in upstate New York complained to the flight's captain that she felt ill and would have skipped the flight but didn't want to pay for a hotel room, according to a new cockpit voice recorder transcript. The extended transcript, released Monday by the National Transportation Safety Board, shows pilot Marvin Renslow commiserated with First Officer Rebecca Shaw, but didn't suggest she pull out of the flight.