AirAsia plane landed in wrong country

Which led to the plane taking off from the wrong runway.

But when you have more than 250 passengers, your airborne vehicle costs some $230 million and you end up some 11,000 km off-course, it’s bound to make the news.

A flight to Malaysia from Sydney accidentally flew 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) in the opposite direction to Melbourne because its pilot entered the wrong coordinates, an Australian aviation investigation report has found.

Air traffic control observed the aircraft turning into the flight path of a parallel runway and informed the pilots who identified a problem with the onboard navigation systems.

Instead of entering the longitude as 151̊ 9.8′ east, or 15109.8 in the system, the pilot incorrectly entered it as 15̊ 19.8′ east, or 01519.8.

The ATSB said Malaysia-based AirAsia X conducted an internal investigation following the incident and reviewed “the recovery procedures to be undertaken in the form of a flight safety notice”.

After three hours the A330 took off again for an “uneventful” 10½ hour flight to Kuala Lumpur.

The ATSB report said the error was not spotted by the first officer when cross checking the flight management and guidance system entries.

According to the ATSB, the Captain of the flight input the wrong coordinates for Sydney Airport into the jet’s flight navigation system.

Data entry errors are often harmless enough, unless you happen to be an worldwide pilot punching in your longitude before a flight.

In a report released yesterday on the incident in March past year, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) described how the incorrect coordinates entry by the captain, a series of alarms and deteriorating weather in Sydney meant the plane had to fly to Melbourne, more than 700km away.

“This resulted in a positional error in excess of 11,000km, which adversely affected the aircraft’s navigation systems and some alerting systems”, the ATSB was quoted saying.

“Flight data and analysis of the occurrence shows a data entry error occurred at this time”, said the ATSB.

The crew chose to return to Sydney but because of bad weather and the degraded systems, the aircraft was instead diverted to Melbourne, where it landed safely.

But eventually, suspecting that their systems were compromised, the pilots requested a visual landing at Sydney – one that wouldn’t rely on the aircraft’s navigational instruments.

AirAsia X would like to stress that we have in place robust management systems to monitor and prevent similar incidents from reoccurring.

The crew elected to discontinue the flight, but couldn’t return to Sydney because the weather had deteriorated, so the aircraft was diverted to Melbourne.