737 'Tailstrike' Caused By Typo On a Tablet (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In August of last year, a Boeing 737 operated by Qantas experienced a tailstrike while taking off — the thrust wasn't great enough for the tail to clear the runway, so it clipped the ground. The investigation into the incident (PDF) has finally been completed, and it found the cause of the accident: the co-pilot accidentally entered the wrong plane weight data into the iPad used to make calculations about the takeoff thrust. "First, when working out the plane's takeoff weight on a notepad, the captain forgot to carry the "1," resulting in an erroneous weight of 66,400kg rather than 76,400kg. Second, the co-pilot made a "transposition error" when carrying out the same calculation on the Qantas on-board performance tool (OPT)—an iPad app for calculating takeoff speed, amongst other things. "Transposition error" is an investigatory euphemism for "he accidentally hit 6 on the keyboard rather than 7." This caused the problem: "For a weight of 76,400kg and temperature of 35C, the engine thrust should've been set at 93.1 percent with a takeoff speed of 157 knots; instead, due to the errors, the thrust was set to 88.4 percent and takeoff speed was 146 knots."

Comments

Re:It's even worse than that now.

[Austerity Empowers]

That'll make for some angry birds.

Siri

[chubs]

"Okay. I found 5 restaurants like 'calculate takeoff thrust' near you"

Re:Data data everywhere and not a drop to think

[Anonymous Coward]

And $745,000 of that is needed to comply with and get the app through DO-178C certification. The rest is pure profit.

Re:It's even worse than that now.

[tripleevenfall]

"76,860 kg" autocorrected to "Settings thousand ate sexy cardiograms"