AirAsia plane diversion, clickbait media reporting

durandal01

"AirAsia flight bound for Malaysia landed in Melbourne after pilot error."

An AirAsia flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur accidentally flies to Melbourne due to wrong data input to navigation system.
Pretty scary scary bit about all the ignored alerts.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/07/aviation/airasia-melbourne-malaysia-error/index.html

Cookiemunster

It didn't acciently fly to Melbourne or land in the wrong country. Read the full actual story. When the pilots couldn't solve the issue they went to return to Sydney, but had to divert to Melbourne due to weather conditions at Sydney.

durandal01

durandal01 wrote: »

"AirAsia flight bound for Malaysia landed in Melbourne after pilot error."

An AirAsia flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur accidentally flies to Melbourne due to wrong data input to navigation system.
Pretty scary scary bit about all the ignored alerts.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/07/aviation/airasia-melbourne-malaysia-error/index.html

It went to Melbourne because they couldn't return to land visually at Sydney, it wasn't accidental it was deliberate.

As for the input error, well that was a right balls up from start to finish. Even the plane knew something was wrong and tried warning them.

vicwatson

Cookiemunster wrote: »

It didn't acciently fly to Melbourne or land in the wrong country. Read the full actual story. When the pilots couldn't solve the issue they went to return to Sydney, but had to divert to Melbuorne due to weather conditions at Sydney.

I guess the point is they entered the wrong coordinates and still scary

Comhrá

vicwatson wrote: »

I guess the point is they entered the wrong coordinates and still scary

Wasn't it the same sort of input error that caused the Air New Zealand DC-10 to collide with Mt. Erebus in Antarctica back in the 1970's?

vicwatson

tippman1 wrote: »

Wasn't it the same sort of input error that caused the Air New Zealand DC-10 to collide with Mt. Erebus in Antarctica back in the 1970's?

Very possibly

Dardania

tippman1 wrote: »

vicwatson wrote: »

I guess the point is they entered the wrong coordinates and still scary

Wasn't it the same sort of input error that caused the Air New Zealand DC-10 to collide with Mt. Erebus in Antarctica back in the 1970's?

That one was a bit more sinister as I recall - the dispatch department changed the route and the pilot just accepted it

Buffman

The AVHeard cover this incident in a less 'Daily Mail' way.

When manually entering the coordinates of the aircraft’s position using a data entry technique that was not recommended by the aircraft manufacturer, the longitude was incorrectly entered as 01519.8 east (15° 19.8’ east) instead of 15109.8 east (151° 9.8’ east). This resulted in a positional error in excess of 11,000 km, which adversely affected the aircraft’s navigation systems and some alerting systems.

The ATSB reported that during flight preparation the captain (ATPL, 22,580 total hours) manually copied the gate coordinates of S33°56.77' E151°09.8', visible on a sign at the gate, into the flight management and guidance system (FMGS), however mistype as S33°56.77' E015°19.8' effective putting the aircraft's systems 161nm west of Cape Town (South Africa) into the Atlantic Ocean more than 11,000km from the actual position at the gate in Sydney

From reading the article, ATC were very much on the ball and prevented the situation from deteriorating futher.

tippman1 wrote: »

Wasn't it the same sort of input error that caused the Air New Zealand DC-10 to collide with Mt. Erebus in Antarctica back in the 1970's?

Ye, I'd say it'd be more comparable to Varig Flight 254 which headed 270 degrees instead of 027 degrees and crashed in the Amazon.

(Although this had an element of outside cause as Varig changed their flight plan heading notation from 3 to 4 digits while the captain was on holidays, so 027 became 0270)