As if distracted driving on our roads is not enough to worry about, now, it seems, airline passengers will be worried about distracted flying.

At least, that is what many people are taking away from the recent incident in which a pilot and co-pilot cruised right by their intended destination of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The pilots says it happened because they were engrossed in using their personal laptop computers to figure out crew scheduling.

A spokesman for the pilots' union said people shouldn't "rush to judgment" and claimed the passengers were never in any danger.

Cruising on autopilot above 10,000 feet might not be as critical or potentially dangerous a part of the flight as the periods around takeoff and landing, but at least one pilot should have been devoting his attention to flying the plane - and listening closely to the radio.

A letter to one of the pilots from an FAA official said the flight was without communication with air traffic controllers and its company dispatcher for about an hour and a half "while you were on a frolic of your own."

Call it a "rush to judgment" if you like, but the fact that neither man heard - or paid attention to - repeated radio calls from air traffic controllers and pilots of other aircraft shows they were nearly oblivious to the real task at hand.

How long would it have taken them to act if an in-flight emergency had occurred, such as a mechanical problem?

Just because nothing bad happened this time doesn't mean the passengers weren't in danger.

The point is not so much what these particular pilots did - the Federal Aviation Administration has revoked their licenses and the airline has suspended them during the inquiry.

The bigger issue is what the incident says about the growing number of distractions in our lives as a result of increasing number of electronic devices in use and the disturbing complacency people are exhibiting toward potentially dangerous activities, whether it's driving a car or flying a plane.

Family time and personal interaction also are being harmed.

These electronic devices were supposed to make our lives easier, not more complicated and stressful.

We don't need congressional hearings on this incident or more rules. If federal regulations and company rules had been followed in this case, there would have been no "incident."

What we need is a greater attention to the task at hand - both on the ground and in the air - and a lot more common sense.