Northwest Airlines takes a detour on October 22, 2009. As a business speaker, I do a fair amount of traveling. Most flights are pretty routine. I get to the airport a little early. I walk around the terminal to get some blood flowing. I make a few phone calls, return a few emails and catch up on whatever the News Channel on the airport big screens is feeding us. I get to my seat, have a drink of water, read for a few minutes and then doze off to napland. Usually the next thing I hear is the announcement that we are about to land. So I get organized and get ready to arrive. We pull up to the gate. I wait my turn to get off the plane and say “thank you” to the flight crew on the way out.
I am betting that if I were on the Northwest flight that missed its stop by 150 miles that I would not have noticed. I probably would have slept through the whole episode; especially since it was an evening flight. If it was a daytime flight, I do like to look out of the windows to look for land marks I recognize form the air. I might have noticed us crossing the Mississippi much farther south and east than we should have been… and asked the flight attendant if we weren’t needing to turn to the airport pretty soon. I can imagine that there will be a few people getting in a lot of trouble over this.
The moral of the story is: “Take a long nap while things you cannot control work themselves out”.
