The Bell Curve:

The case of the errant Northwest Airlines pilots hit closer to home for me than I care to remember.

In case you haven’t followed their adventures, which were in the news last week, the two pilots overshot their destination of Minneapolis by 150 miles.

They also ignored an hour of frantic phone calls from air traffic controllers and arrived with a load of 144 passengers very late and full of conflicting explanations that started with a denial that they had both fallen asleep, and ended with their tossing it off as “no big deal.”

The Federal Aviation Administration, which governs such matters, didn’t agree. The FAA grounded both pilots, pending an investigation.

It didn’t help the pilots’ cause any, nor the comfort of airline passengers, when one of them told the Associated Press, “I can tell you that airplanes lose contact with the ground people all the time. It happens. Sometimes they get together right away, sometimes it takes awhile before one or the other notice that they are not in contact.”

All of this took me back 64 years, when my Navy squadron was pulled out of dive bombers and assigned to four-engine transports, flying mostly out of Okinawa where the major fighting was taking place.

Our preparation for this switch was a few weeks of multi-engine instrument flying. The rest we learned on the job, reflecting the conviction that a Navy pilot with 1,500 hours in the air could fly any plane, including landings and take-offs, to which he was assigned.

On the night that I remember so vividly, we were a crew of two pilots, a navigator and a radio operator flying more than a hundred wounded Marines in double-deck bunk beds from Okinawa to hospitals in Hawaii.

Our departure was delayed by a Japanese trick our ground forces had never before encountered: Two Japanese light bombers simply joined our landing pattern. The audacity of it so startled our troops that the first plane got down before they realized what was happening and shot down the second while it was still airborne.

But by then, a covey of suicide troops had burst out of the belly of the first plane and were running about our air field attacking grounded planes and anyone who got in the way. Our hospital plane was partly loaded and they missed it, thank God, but our departure for Hawaii was delayed until the attackers were all killed and order restored.

We had missed our scheduled sleep time during all this action, so the captain of our little group — a former airline pilot who turned his skills over to the Navy — sent me to the pilot’s bunk as soon as we reached flying altitude. I don’t remember how long I slept before he awakened me and took over the bunk. For the next several hours, I remember only gulping coffee and keeping talk going with the navigator while I fought off sleep and checked flight instruments — especially an auto-pilot that could only be found in a museum today. I would turn it off and fly the plane periodically to help keep myself awake.

Finally, the navigator fell asleep, then nurses tending to the wounded stopped poking their heads inside our door, and it felt very empty in the cockpit. And that’s the way it was when a streak of flame leaped suddenly out of the No. 4 engine.

The next five minutes are a blur of flashes wrapped in vivid bits of memory. First, I pulled a master switch releasing a fire retardant. Then I shot it into the wrong engine. By that time the captain was at my side, controlling the fire and somehow getting the other engine that I had momentarily killed back into service while I flew the plane. It was all over in a few desperate moments. The fire was extinguished, the dead engine feathered and the other three engines functioning normally.

All we had to do then was find territory that the U.S. controlled in the middle of the Pacific to make an emergency landing. The closest with an airstrip long enough to handle us was Eniwetok, and so our navigator pointed us there. Because we weren’t allowed open radio transmission we had a few anxious moments while the people on the ground identified the friendly code-word we were sending out. We made a safe landing.

Reinforcements arrived the next day to carry our wounded Marines on to Hawaii, and our crew deadheaded back. I never saw any of them again. But I have wondered if the guy sitting beside me that day might have been reincarnated in the pilot who saved several hundred lives, when he put his damaged airliner down in the Hudson River in January.

I don’t know if there is any moral to this story. It has been told so many times over the past six decades that the details have probably been massaged in the telling. Or nomenclature lost in time. But not the basic story. It happened.

So the next time you fly commercially, don’t panic if your captain strolls through the cabin during the flight. There’s a lot more technology than we had that night over the Pacific on duty at his seat in the cockpit — or maybe a game of gin rummy. But it’s still a lot safer than crossing Pacific Coast Highway at rush hour.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.