Consider the news reports:
They had flown through the night with no response as air traffic controllers in two states and pilots of other planes over a wide swath of the mid-continent tried to get their attention by radio, data message and cell phone.
Not only couldn't air traffic controllers and other pilots raise the Northwest pilots for an hour, but the airline's dispatcher should have been trying to reach them as well.
Air traffic controllers in Denver had been in contact with the pilots as they flew over the Rockies, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said. But as the plane got closer to Minneapolis, she said, "The Denver center tried to contact the flight but couldn't get anyone."
Denver controllers notified their counterparts in Minneapolis, who also tried to reach the crew without success, Brown said.
Officials suspect Flight 188's radio might still have been tuned to a frequency used by Denver controllers even though the plane had flown beyond their reach, said
Church, the spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Union. Controllers worked throughout the incident with the pilots of other planes, asking them to try to raise Flight 188 using the Denver frequency, he said.
Two pilots flying in the vicinity were also finally able to raise the Northwest pilots using a Denver traffic control radio frequency instead of the local Minneapolis frequency.
Review
snaproll3480's experience:
While on a flight from Canada to NY (intentional vagueness), ATC had inadvertantly miscommunicated our flight number from one center to another. Now this wasn't simply a dislexic transcription but an entirely different call sign with an admittedly similar but not easily recognizable flight number. Our phantom callsign was given a frequency change without response and we continued on our way. It was not until I knew it was time to descend that I queried why we had not been given the expected descent. ATC responded by asking who we were and our position. I told them our callsign again and our position and was told to contact another frequency which I recognized as the next one in sequence. After contacting them they also aked who we were and our callsign. After some figuring, they realized that they had the incorrect callsign and had been trying to contact us for some time.
Throughout this episode we never received a selcal, acars message, or any other form of alert as to the mistake because they were probably trying to alert the wrong airline about a lost airplane that didn't exist.
Do you vote sleep or frequency?