Input error caused KL-bound AirAsia flight to land in Melbourne
ATSB reportedly said ‘even experienced flight crew are not immune from data entry errors’ and advised AirAsia to upgrade its flight systems
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 7 — Australian authorities have found that an AirAsia flight from Sydney to Malaysia had mistakenly ended up in Melbourne because the pilot had put in the wrong coordinates in the plane’s navigation system.
UK paper The Guardian reported today that the Airbus A330 — which was scheduled to leave Sydney international airport at 11.55am on March 10, 2015, and arrive in Kuala Lumpur about nine hours later — had landed in neighbouring city Melbourne instead just after 2pm.
According to The Guardian, a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) published today found that the problem happened when the captain and first officer swapped their usual pre-flight checks due to faulty earmuffs.
Because the captain’s earmuffs were not available, he took over the cockpit tasks that included entering their current coordinates, usually given as the coordinates of the departure gate, into the jet’s internal navigation system.
ATSB reportedly said the captain manually copied the coordinates from a sign outside the cockpit window into the system and that later analysis showed a “data entry error”.
The Guardian reported that the captain had incorrectly entered the longitude as 15° 19.8’ east, or 01519.8, instead of 151° 9.8’ east, or 15109.8 in the system.
“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.
Australian air safety authorities reportedly said the crew from the Malaysian budget carrier had “a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error”, but failed to notice it until they had become airborne.
Those opportunities reportedly included a message that appeared on the captain’s screen during crosscheck of the cockpit’s preparations, which the first officer reportedly told ATSB investigators that he had seen but not mentioned because it was “too quick to interpret”, as well as three separate chimes that were ignored because they were not accompanied by a message from the computer.
An alert blaring “TERRAIN! TERRAIN!” was not ignored, but both pilots reportedly pressed on as the busy runways at the Sydney airport made it “undesirable” to make a full response.
Both the captain and first officer reportedly tried but failed to fix the system and air traffic control told them that they should head to Melbourne since weather and visibility had worsened in Sydney, in response to their request to return to Sydney.
According to The Guardian, the ATSB reportedly said “even experienced flight crew are not immune from data entry errors” and advised AirAsia to upgrade its flight systems.
Source: Malay Mail Online