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Data Entry Blunders Force Air Asia Pilots To Land in Melbourne Instead of Malaysia (mashable.com)
A flight from Sydney to Malaysia ended up in Melbourne after the captain incorrectly entered the plane's location in its navigation system just before take-off, according to a safety investigation, whose conclusion was published this week. Mashable reports:The Air Asia pilots made several errors in entering data into the aircraft's navigation system, which caused them to follow an incorrect flight path out of Sydney, according to Australian transportation officials. While troubleshooting the incorrect flight path, the pilots were unable to fix the issue, and may have compounded it. The aircraft's systems would not allow the plane to be flown in instrument conditions and the weather also had deteriorated in Sydney by the time the pilots decided to turn back. They were directed via radar to a visual approach in Melbourne where they could land safely. The pilots did not believe the airport was located in Malaysia.
'The pilots did not believe the airport was located in Malaysia.'
Why would the pilots after turning back and landing in melborne believe they were in malaysia...
Mashable reports...
That summary is such a hodge-podge of disconnected half-facts. A link to a publication written by trained journalists, or even trained monkeys, might be more coherent.
"The Air Asia pilots made several errors..."
Note To Self: Never fly with Air Asia!
Pure speculation, but could something similar have happened to MH370? By the time they realized the issue they were too far from land.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2015/aair/ao-2015-029/
Navigation grade inertial nav systems need to know their initial position in order to perform accurately. According to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report, an erroneous longitude value was entered prior to takeoff. This is very curious, as initial position is supplied automatically from GPS, unless (1) GPS is not available; or (2) the system is very old and doesn't have that feature. If the latitude is correct but the longitude is wrong, the INS will probably align properly, but it really won't know where the heck it is.
Posts like yours make me wonder if people are trolls or just morons.
Most people left on this site are morons. Usually IT guys who are looking for some excitement. Pathetic, but there ya go.
...now explain why it flew along the correct route for about an hour, and then the lack of radio contact.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The same happened in Brazil almost 30 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_254):
Varig Flight 254 was a Boeing 737-241, c/n 21006/398, registration PP-VMK, on a scheduled passenger flight from São Paulo, Brazil, to Belém, Pará, Brazil, with several intermediate stopovers, on 3 September 1989. Prior to takeoff from Marabá, Pará, towards the final destination, the crew entered an incorrect heading into the flight computer. Instead of flying towards its destination, the plane flew due west and after some time was over a remote area of the Amazon jungle. Attempts to reach an alternative airport were unsuccessful, and the plane eventually ran out of fuel. The pilot made a belly landing in the jungle, 1,050 mi (1,690 km) northwest of Rio de Janeiro. There were 54 occupants on board—48 passengers and a crew of six; 13 passengers died, and many more sustained serious injuries. The survivors were rescued two days later.
Have gnu, will travel.
If they hadn't done that it would have been too obvious. (For pretty much any values of "they" and "it")
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is a much more complicated and interesting story than the headline or first glance would suggest. (because as is common, the headline makes it sound like a bunch of bungling pilots from a LCC airline were flailing about stupidly, which is not the case)
The omission of a trailing zero digit in the manual entry of longitude during system initialization caused serious autopilot/navigation problems that were not resolved by automated cross-checks that should've caught it. (Error #1)
Then, as a result of trying to fix/diagnose the problem on the fly, the flight display/instruments were put into a failure/safe mode where only visual flight conditions could be handled (Error #2).
It turned out ok in this case (just a diversion), but if the weather had been poor or other combinations of conditions existed, it could've easily gone wrong. Very interesting...
So are they former or future Slashdot editors?
A "Former" Captain did this? I hope he's been fired. Doesn't matter what the issue is, it was user error unless the plane was broke.
checks article Yup, Airbus.
e.g. You plug in all the numbers for your flight path. It should then display a world map with your flight path overlaid, so you can easily check that the numbers you entered have you at least landing on the right continent. This sort of sanity-checking is common in other fields, like accountants check to see if a discrepancy is divisible by 9 to quickly identify a transposition error.
This is one of the reasons I still advocate doing navigation in nautical miles instead of km. One nautical mile is defined as 1 arc-minute of longitude at the equator, which is also pretty close to 1 arc-minute of latitude anywhere on Earth. So basically you look on your big navigation chart with latitude lines labeled in degrees and minutes, and you immediately have a sense of scale in terms of nautical miles (each degree is 60 nm). You do a bunch of complex navigation calculations in nautical miles, plot it on the chart, and say, "Hey that doesn't look right. My destination is over 30 arc-minutes away, but my calculations say I'll only be sailing less than 30 nm. I must've made a math error somewhere..." Whereas if you do it in km, the sense of scale is not as intuitive and you may not uncover the error until you're far along the route and wondering why the landmarks you were expecting aren't showing up.
Is it Captain Sum Ting Wong again?
But Asians have a different symbol for each possible number value, so much of the number system is truncated to work when translated to the normal world.
Is this the category you fall into?
http://www.gcmap.com/featured/...
It would have been nice to see a map in the news article to give some idea to those reading it unfamiliar with the area just how big of a "blunder" this was. From the Great Circle Mapper website I linked to above we see that KUL is about 4000 miles from SYD, and SYD is less than 500 miles from MEL. Given the typical cruising speed of a jetliner they were in the air for perhaps not much more than an hour on a flight that would have lasted 8 or 9 hours. Since they knew right away something was wrong I doubt they were flying much longer than that, maybe 3 hours. If they were flying much longer than that I suspect they would have landed much further from either SYD or MEL, or we'd be reading about a plane lost at sea.
The article makes a big deal about "landing in the wrong country" which I suppose is a big deal if you take off in the USA, headed for Canada, but end up in India. Much less of a deal if you take off from USA while headed for Canada but a technical problem means you have to land back in USA.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
No, this is a system that needs a serious design change. This is a common error that happens all the time that hasn't been fixed for decades! And the reason why it has difficulty being reprogrammed in flight is because the INS fails to get a proper setup and the error too large. This is why you have to do this on the ground for a good 15 minutes while not moving. Yes, there are ways to do this in flight with some error (Especially with systems linked to the GPS), but many pilots aren't trained to do this.
Why this still happens is beyond me considering all the new technology out there that can resolve this very easily.
You plug in all the numbers for your flight path. It should then display a world map with your flight path overlaid
This in fact was accomplished but the process only displays the route in map mode that does not include a aircraft symbol. The route wasn't the problem, the initial position was. One crosscheck they missed was route distance which would have been off considerably.
This is one of the reasons I still advocate doing navigation in nautical miles instead of km.
In aviation, nautical miles are the only standard. Kilometers are never used. Unfortunately, meters are still used in some parts of the world for altitude assignments.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?