Here’s your daily dose of WTF news of the day: an AirAsia flight bound for Kuala Lumpur from Sydney ended up in Melbourne instead after the pilot mistakenly entered the wrong coordinates into the internal navigation system.
UK newspaper The Guardian reported that the Airbus A330 — which was reportedly scheduled to depart the Sydney Airport at 11.55am on March 10, 2015 and touch down in KL nine hours later — had landed in the neigbouring Australian city just after 2pm.
According to a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) cited by the daily, the problem occured shortly before take-off when faulty earmuffs forced the captain and the first officer to swap their usual pre-flight checks.
As the earmuffs were not available to him, the captain reportedly took over the cockpit tasks, which included entering their current coordinates – which was usually given as the coordinates of the departure gate – into the plane’s navigation system.
The report revealed that the captain had manually copied the coordinates from a sign outside the cockpit window into the system, prompting a “data entry error” message to show up.
To make matters worse, the captain then reportedly incorrectly entered the longitude as 15° 19.8’ east, or 01519.8, instead of the correct one which is 151° 9.8’ east, or 15109.8, into the system.
These mistakes, according to ATSB, resulted in a “a positional error in excess of 11,000km” which reportedly affected the aircraft’s navigation and alerting systems.
Australian air safety authorities reportedly said in the report that the crew had “a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error”, but they failed to do so as they only noticed the errors after they were airborne.
Those opportunities, ATSB revealed, included a message that reportedly flashed up on the captain’s screen during crosscheck of the cockpit preparations, which the first officer reportedly told authorities afterwards that he had seen but not mentioned because it was “too quick to interpret”.
The crew also reportedly ignored three separate alert chimes because they were not accompanied by a message from the system.
The report noted that the crew did not ignore the fifth warning sign, an alert blaring “TERRAIN! TERRAIN!”, — although they reportedly admitted later that it “startled” them — but they decided to press on as the busy runways at the Sydney airport made it “undesirable” to make a full response.
The captain and the first officer had reportedly tried to fix the system but failed, and when they requested to return to Sydney, the air traffic control reportedly told them to head to Melbourne instead as weather conditions had worsened in Sydney.
According to The Guardian, the jet reportedly spent three hours on Melbourne ground as the technical team scrambled to fix the problem before departing for Kuala Lumpur.
The flight reportedly landed safely in KL at 10.20pm local time – six hours behind schedule.
