Earlier this year, the captain of a luxury ocean liner took me on a tour of the bridge during an Adriatic cruise. She virtually sails herself, he said, pointing at a joystick no bigger than my little finger in the centre of the ship's Star Trek controls.

"Just one flick of that and the computer does everything else. I don't really need to be here at all."

I was reminded of his words after reading about the strange case of Flight 188 recently. On the evening of October 21, a Northwest jet carrying 144 passengers and five crew from San Diego to Minneapolis overshot its destination by 150 miles before the crew realised their mistake and turned around.

When the aircraft failed to land, air traffic control made constant efforts to contact its pilots by radio, mobile phone, text message and email but were met with a deafening silence for more than an hour.

President Obama was informed; fighter jets were scrambled; there were fears that another 9/11 was about to unfold.

Finally, after a terrifying 90 minutes, frantic cabin crew made contact with the pilots through the intercom system. Initially it was thought the crew had fallen asleep, but they claimed they had been toying on their personal laptops and had lost track of time.

Fortunately, the Airbus A320 landed safely and passengers weren't even aware of the drama until they read about it in the evening news, but the incident has raised grave questions about cockpit automation and whether aircraft have simply become too easy to fly, leaving flight crew idle during long flights and prone to sleep, heated conversations or other distractions.

Because pilots are so busy during take-off and landing, under the 'sterile cockpit rule' they are forbidden from discussing anything non-flight related below 10,000 feet. But once they have reached cruising altitude, computers take over and there's not much left for them to do.

Irregular schedules, jet lag and general monotony undoubtedly cause fatigue at 30,000 feet, a problem pilot organisations claim has reached crisis point as airlines fight for survival.

The pilots on Flight 188, whose licences have been revoked pending an investigation, insist they were not dozing at the stick, but how then did repeated calls from ground control go unheard?

On all flights, pilots receive frequent instructions from the ground, normally through headsets or a cockpit loudspeaker, if for no other reason than to make sure they are still in command. It is impossible not to hear this buzzing and beeping unless they are asleep or tuned to the wrong radio frequency.

Another worry is that since September 11, pilots are much more isolated from the rest of the plane than they used to be. The attacks on the Twin Towers resulted in cockpit doors being locked during flights to keep hijackers out. Cabin crew, who were once in and out of the cockpit checking on the well-being of their pilots, do not even hold a key to open them and their only interaction with them is by intercom.

We might never know the full truth about Flight 188 because the cockpit's voice recorder is only capable of storing 30 minutes of audio, so anything said by the pilots when they were out of contact would have been lost. There has been talk of banning laptops and installing cameras in the cockpit, while Boeing has equipped some of its models with a system that sends out noisy alarms in the cockpit when it fails to detect signs of life.

Even America's most heroic pilot, Chesley Sullenberger -- the captain of the US Airways' flight that landed in the Hudson River last January -- admits that complacency can be a problem.

"One of the many challenges of our profession is that it's become so ultra-safe," he said recently. "When it's possible to go several calendar years without a single fatality, as we've just done, it's sometimes easy to forget what's really at stake."

- Gemma O'Doherty

Irish Independent