After a single airliner went ever so slightly astray because its flight crew were using laptops in the cockpit, lawmakers are poised to bring regulations crashing down that forbid almost any kind of gadget being used by pilots. That's just dumb.

All this fuss is about Northwest Flight 188 a few weeks ago. During a regular, unsurprising and otherwise uneventful flight to Minneapolis the plane, which was carrying 144 passengers, dropped out of contact with air traffic controllers. As a result it ignored flight direction instructions and repeated calls to respond to radio commands, and kept flying. In fact it was out of touch for 91 minutes, and flew past its destination and on over Wisconsin--only turning around and contacting ground crew when alerted by a flight attendant.

What caused all this to happen--a terrorist attack? A mechanical failure? A mysterious alien abduction or Fringe-like parascientific event? Nope. The two pilots were busy fussing with their own laptops to work out an argument about a new piece of crew scheduling software, and basically forgot what they were supposed to be doing. This isn't, in fact, against any FAA regulations--by using their machines the crew weren't violating any rules, as they weren't in landing approach or below 10,000 feet.