Last month, for 77 minutes, Minneapolis-bound Northwest Airlines flight 188 was out of radio contact.
And today the Federal Aviation Administration admits it was more than an hour before it notified the U.S. military.
"It was 69 minutes. We should have raised it to the DEN - the Domestic Events Network - between five and ten minutes after no radio contact," FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt acknowledged today.
By the time NORAD found out the jetliner had overshot its destination, the military had little time to react and decided not to scramble fighter jets.
The FAA says air traffic controllers in Minneapolis and Denver took far too long to realize they had a problem.
"There were a couple of shift changes of controllers during this time and we think there were a couple lost opportunities to hand off the status of the aircraft correctly," said Hank Krakowski of the FAA Air Traffic Organization.
They claim they were distracted and using a laptop computer, which the FAA worries is a sign of an erosion in pilot professionalism.
"There are two people in the cockpit. The other person is a professional as well. We're in a sterile cockpit environment; we can continue this conversation on the ground," adds Babbitt.
The Northwest pilots have had their licenses revoked, and are now appealing their grounding.
And in the meantime, the FAA says it's changing its own procedures to make sure nothing like this happens ever again.
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