Wordsmoker Exclusive: Northwest Airlines Flight 188

The mystery surrounding two Northwest Airlines pilots who overflew Minneapolis by 150 miles took a startling turn tonight with the revelation that they were using their laptops to access Wordsmoker when they should have been preparing to land the aircraft.  This rumor, which had been circulating for days on Gawker, a once-popular media blog, can now be confirmed based on information gleaned from multiple sources, including leaked cockpit recordings.

Senior officials with the National Transportation Safety Board were skeptical of the pilots’ claim that they were using their laptops to “bid” on future flights, leading one FAA investigator to insist that the two men be subjected to further interrogation.  “You can hear it clearly on the voice recorder,” said the agent, who spoke exclusively to Wordsmoker on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the investigation.  “One of them goes, ‘[Expletive] BookishLookish wins all the [expletive] awards.  She must be  [expletive] schtupping someone important over there.  I really thought I had an [expletive] shot this week.’  Then there’s something about the mating habits of penguins, but that part’s all garbled so we couldn’t pursue it.”

While under “enhanced” interrogation, one of the pilots admitted that he “never misses Monday Morning Maya,” even refreshing his computer screen during takeoff and landing.  The other pilot stated that on several occasions he has put planes on autopilot so that he could enjoy following debates in the comments section.  Said this pilot, “There’s these couple of guys, boy howdy, I’d swear they had Ph.Ds in economics the way they carry on!”

The FAA investigator provided Wordsmoker with a highly-confidential preliminary report on the incident that will be presented Tuesday morning to Wotan Lind, head of the FAA’s Denver regional office.  The draft shows investigators from both the FAA and the FBI engaged in a frantic effort to obtain sensitive Wordsmoker records that could identify these and other pilots as contributors to the site.  Alf Y. Wailly, a senior airline industry analyst who was briefed on the investigation, confirmed to this reporter that a much wider probe will soon be underway.  “We suspect that a lot of pilots are reading Wordsmoker and trying to find dates using the private messaging system when they should be performing critical tasks such as lying to passengers about weather conditions and delays.”

Agents’ field reports outline the frustrations of executing search warrants on shadowy foreign nationals whose very existence is in doubt.  There is widespread belief, for instance, that Virus W. Shoes, the Editor in Chief of Wordsmoker, is not an actual person, but is instead a collective.  While some maintain that Mr. Shoes carefully controls every detail of this web site’s operation, including who wins the coveted weekly “Smokie” awards, no one has ever seen him in person, and no one can state with certainty that they’ve spoken to him.

But a former intern to Mr. Shoes, Marybeth “Mama” Penguino of Bismarck, North Dakota, is quoted in the secret report as stating, “I can assure you that The Master exists, and that he has very exacting ideas on how the office should be run.  He goes through interns like Irn-bru.  I can show you marks.”  The report further states that Ms. Penguino repeatedly offered to show these marks to investigators, who politely, and repeatedly, declined.

When reached by phone for comment on this article, a person identifying himself as Mr. Shoes subjected this reporter to a long and scatological discourse on the importance of a free and unencumbered press as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  When informed that the Second Amendment covers gun ownership, he handed the phone to a woman who identified herself only as “Ms. Shortcake.”  Claiming to be the current Wordsmoker intern, Ms. Shortcake gasped and ended the interview abruptly at the same time that a loud swishing sound could be heard in the background.

More details will be provided as they become available.