A jolly day at the office

[KL-666]

An AirAsia A330 flew Sydney - Melbourne instead of Sydney - Kuala Lumpur.

Why? Because in an Airbus you can tell it where you are, instead of the gps telling you where you are, by punching in lon/lat manually. Airbus must have a patent on "Beam me up Scotty".

So in Sydney the pilots punched in that they rather wanted to be in Cape Town at that moment. Resulting in different interesting effects:

- The plane wanted to fly to Cape town first, before going to Kuala Lumpur
- More interestingly, the magnetic compasses on the PFD and ND are not earth magnetic at all. They are calculated from true heading + location on earth. Resulting in a diff of some 40 degrees between being in Sydney or Cape Town. Only the backup compass is truly functioning on the earth magnetism. But hey, who looks at that fossil nowadays.

Anyway, up in the air, being told by ATC they are flying in the wrong direction, they start debugging their magenta thingy, like true programmers. And they reached a point that says: reboot the ADIRU's. So they started doing that. After shutting down 2 out of 3, they found the loss of information on the PFD and ND so discomforting, that they stopped in their tracks.

Due to barely any information on the PFD and ND now, they advised Sydney that they could not return there because the weather was too bad for a visual. So they were vectored to CAVOK Melbourne and made it to a visual landing there. So, well, at least they flew the plane, even with deteriorated instruments.

Here is an article about it in The Guardian. But if you follow the reference to the actual report in that article, you have a much more interesting read.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/07/airasia-pilot-flies-melbourne-malaysia-navigation-error

Kind regards, Vincent

[IAHM-COL]

Hilarious.
except for the passengers on a tight schedule, or willing to arrive their dreamt vacation

[HJ1an]

I read that. The headlines are a bit misleading.

They didn't end up at Melbourne by their errors, they were directed there as a result of finding the error and unable to return to Sydney. Other than that, I cannot fathom just how the heck everything else went. I haven't read the article you linked yet, but on another site I read that they actually had a ground proximity warning. That was what triggered them to get out of zombie mode and try to brain just what on earth is going on.

(update: the article is exactly the same as copied from the other site I read from)

[SHM]

Both hilarious as well as concerning.

Why? Because in an Airbus you can tell it where you are, instead of the gps telling you where you are, by punching in lon/lat manually. Airbus must have a patent on "Beam me up Scotty".

You can enter the lat/lon manually in the boeing too

[KL-666]

The pure fact that you can type in something is not the most concerning thing to me. Might be useful if everything else is defect. But the silent accepting by the machine i consider a grave design faillure. I would have expected a huge alert message saying: "Are you really, really, really sure that you want this? It is 11.000 km away from where i think you are!".

Other manufacturers of such electronics must be smarter than this one i may hope. Or maybe not?

Kind regards, Vincent

[SHM]

During the crosscheck of the cockpit preparation, the FO reported seeing a flag or indication flash up on the captain’s navigation display (ND), but that it was too quick to interpret. The FO did not mention this to the captain as there was no associated electronic centralised aircraft monitoring (ECAM) or STATUS message.

[KL-666]

I know that there were some alert sounds, they could not relate to anything meaningful. And a flag that quickly flashes away again is not exactly a huge alert message pointing you at the issue while typing.

Kind regards, Vincent

[SHM]

See the last one.


The overhead panel

[SHM]

I know that there were some alert sounds, they could not relate to anything meaningful. And a flag that quickly flashes away again is not exactly a huge alert message pointing you at the issue while typing.

Kind regards, Vincent

The aircraft was not fitted with an upgraded flight management system that would have negated the positional data entry error via either automated initialisation of the air data and inertial reference system, or the automatic correction of manual errors.

[KL-666]

True, but such grave design faillure should never have entered any plane in the first place.

About the ADIRU's: Why on earth offer the irreversible rotary switch option at all then? It does not seem to help you in any way in flight. This should typically have been implemented in the circuit breaker section.

Kind regards, Vincent