Two pilots flying at 37,000 feet fall asleep, miss landing

New Delhi: Two pilots flying a plane from Sudan to Ethiopia fell asleep when the aircraft was 37,000 feet above sea level, and missed their landing. The incident happened on Monday (August 15), and the pilots subsequently succeeded in safely landing the aircraft without reporting any injuries, according to The Aviation Herald.

Flight ET-343 – a Boeing 737 – was scheduled to land at the Addis Ababa airport. The Herald report said the aircraft continued past the top of descent and followed the route planned by the Flight Management Computer (FMC) without, however, descending.

Aviation analyst Alex Macheras tweeted: "Deeply concerning incident at Africa’s largest airline — Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 #ET343 was still at cruising altitude of 37,000ft by the time it reached destination Addis Ababa. Why hadn’t it started to descend for landing? Both pilots were asleep."

 The flight was on autopilot mode the whole time the pilots were asleep and failed to descend. The Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) tried to contact them multiple times but did not receive a response.When the flight overflew the runway, the autopilot got disconnected, and sounded an alarm. It was this sound that finally woke the pilots up. They quickly maneouvered the aircraft and safely landed it nearly 25 minutes after overflying the runway.