A call from a flight attendant to the pilots of the Northwest Airlines plane that overshot Minneapolis catapulted the cockpit crew from complacency to confusion.

Interviews with the flight crew and other documents released Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board indicate the pilots were completely unaware of their predicament until the moment the intercom rang. They were unaware that they had flown their Airbus A320 with 144 passenger more than 100 miles past their destination, that air traffic controllers and their airline's dispatchers had been struggling to reach them for more than an hour, or that the military was at that moment readying fighter jets for an intercept mission.

Timothy Cheney, the captain of Flight 188, said he looked up from his laptop to discover there was no longer any flight information programmed into the Airbus A320's computer. He said his navigation system showed Duluth, Minnesota, off to his left and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, ahead on the right.

The plane had been out of radio contact for 77 minutes as it flew across a broad swath of the country on Oct. 21, raising national security concerns.

Cheney, 54, and First Officer Richard Cole, 54, told investigators they had taken out their laptops and were absorbed in working on a complicated crew scheduling program that they were required to learn following Delta Air Lines' acquisition of Northwest a year earlier. Cole told investigators they became distracted as they "got deeper and deeper into it."

Cheney said he was "blown away" by how long the conversation _ which was only supposed to take about 10 minutes _ went on. Investigators wrote that Cheney felt embarrassed. Their report quotes him saying "I was wrong" and that he "let another force come from the outside and distract me."

The tension of the moment the pilots became aware of their predicament was evident in the crew interviews.

According to a statement signed by flight attendant Barbara Logan, she called the cockpit around 8:15 p.m. CDT to find out when they would be landing. She was told they would land around 12 Greenwich Mean Time. "I said I did not know the time _ he said I was hosed and hung up."

The lead flight attendant called to get gate information and was apparently also hung up on, according to Logan's report. That flight attendant later got through to the cockpit.

Investigators' interviews with Cheney and Cole also hint at tension between the pilots. The pair were flying together for the first time. Cheney characterized Cole's piloting skills as "OK, but I've flown with better." He complained that Cole had missed some steps when they were readying for takeoff because he apparently was still learning Delta's procedures.