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I am reminded for some reason about an Air Asia (?) flight a few years ago that departed SYD/MEL for KUL (?) where by some fat finger accident one of the pilots
by supernova87a 5y ago
I am reminded for some reason about an Air Asia (?) flight a few years ago that departed SYD/MEL for KUL (?) where by some fat finger accident one of the pilots initialized the plane's location (while on the ground), skipping or misplacing one decimal point in the lat/long somewhere.
He had to do it manually because some FD/GPS system was not correctly functioning or was inop, and then after doing this there was no warning that the plane's current position was suddenly registered as several hundred miles away from its last position. (correction, there were some warnings that were noticed but disregarded as they were very short and disappeared momentarily)
On takeoff, the autopilot was engaged and dutifully turned its heading to the course believed to be from the current (erroneous) position to the first desired waypoint -- throwing the plane into an unexpected large turn in a low altitude risky phase of takeoff. The pilots correctly saw some problem, but incorrectly then carried out a series of mistaken recovery steps leading to full disengagement of the plane's normal coordinated flight controls ("normal law", etc) to try and get it to behave. Apparently, everything except just shutting A/P off.
Well, one thing cascaded on another, the plane couldn't be reset back into normal flight control mode, there was fog, etc. and they couldn't land back in MEL and had to divert several hundred miles to SYD or wherever and a whole incident. It could have been even worse.
Seems that complicated systems... can get complicated easily if you overlook or start off unsure of what has gone wrong.
- supernova87a 5y agoAh, here it is: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/07/airasia-pilot-flies-melbourne-malaysia-navigation-error https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/07/airas... http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2015/aair/ao-2015-029/ http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/20...
- twistedpair 5y agoVarig Flight 254 was another similar case [1]. Bad FMC data entry during preflight caused pilots to fly west, rather than east, until they were too low on fuel and crashed into the Amazon rainforest. Sun was setting, so cardinal direction was obvious, leading some passengers to ask flight attendants why they were flying the wrong direction, but they were brushed off. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_254 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_254
- supernova87a 5y agoWell, that's just unforgiveable, reading about the details. The passengers even tried to alert the crew but were rebuffed. To be so situationally unaware for that long, and with that many people's lives in your hands. I mean, it was 1989 but still.