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One day, a high-flying Air India jet was flying from Abu Dhabi to New York City. On board were 250 passengers and crew members. They were all doing their best to enjoy the flight and relax as the plane soared through the sky. Once they reached cruising altitude, however, everything went quickly downhill. The co-pilot of Flight 181 had turned on his mobile phone and started texting someone during takeoff — which is strictly against Air India's rules for both personal devices and those that are not supposed to be used during flights. And once the co-pilot's phone started buzzing, so did panic buttons in the cockpit. The captain of the flight radioed Air Traffic Control to say that there was "abnormal activity" in the cockpit. Panicked, he said that someone had entered the flight deck and started manipulating the controls. That was all it took for Air Traffic Control to declare an emergency situation. When human error causes an aircraft to be brought down, it's called a "ground accident." If an onboard device (like a phone or camera) is used improperly, the pilot or crew can be penalized for not following rules or operating procedures. But that didn't happen in the case of Flight 181. "The co-pilot was not even brandishing a weapon," said Capt. Robert Sumwalt, who is leading the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation. "He did not threaten anyone and certainly did not control the aircraft — and yet we ended up with a 'ground accident' because he was texting." That's because Sumwalt and his colleagues will never know just how badly things deteriorated once the co-pilot started typing away on his phone without realizing that it should have been off during the flight. The co-pilot, identified as 27-year-old Narendra Bhatia by officials at Air India, was distracted. When he looked up from his phone to see what the problem was, the jet had already entered Indian airspace. He spun the plane around so it headed back toward Abu Dhabi, but had no control of its extremely high speed. The aircraft reached nearly twice its normal altitude, went supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) over the ocean and then started to spin out of control. "From a cockpit, this is a very hard thing to see," Sumwalt said. "It's going from almost a certain level of confidence to complete disarray just in the time it takes for someone to type." It was at that point that nine passengers rushed into the cockpit and began trying to save the plane just as it was about to fall from the sky. "They did everything right," Sumwalt said. "That airplane would have gone a lot further without them." The only problem: The pilots were still in their seats, unable to do anything at all. cfa1e77820
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