Flight to Malaysia ends up in Melbourne

An AirAsia flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur instead ended up in Melbourne, Australia, when the pilot made a navigation error.

The captain of the A330 entered the wrong co-ordinates into the internal navigation system, according to an air safety investigation.

The passengers, who were expecting to make a nine hour flight to Malaysia, landed in Melbourne just over two hours after taking off from Sydney’s international airport.

Melbourne is just over 700 kms southwest of Sydney, while Kuala Lumpur is 6,610 kms northwest.

The report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau blamed the error on a pair of faulty earmuffs, which led to the captain and the first officer swapping their usual pre-flight checks.

Normally it was the first office who keyed in the flight co-ordinates while the captain inspected the exterior of the plane, but as his ear protection wasn’t available on that day, the pair swapped roles.

The report said that the captain manually copied the aircraft’s existing coordinates from a sign outside the cockpit window into the system, but instead of entering the longitude as 15109.8 he entered 015109.8.

"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 said.

The report said the captain and his first officer had ‘a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error’ but did not notice it until they had become airborne and started to fly in the wrong direction.

They ignored a message that flashed up on the captain’s screen and three separate chimes. They also ignored a verbal alarm shouting ‘Terrain! Terrain’ because they could see the way ahead was clear.

It was only when the autopilot engaged as the plane reached 410 feet and it tracked the plane towards the flight path of another runway that they realised their mistake.

Attempts to rectify the error by both the captain and the first officer resulted in ‘further degradation of the navigation system’, said the ATSB.

They requested to return to Sydney, but as they had to make a manual landing without the aid of onboard navigation systems and visibility in Sydney was poor, they were told to fly on to Melbourne.

It eventually continued on to KL, arriving six hours late.

The ATSB said ‘even experienced flight crew are not immune from data entry errors’ and AirAsia has been advised to upgrade its flight systems to prevent or detect such errors in future.