An investigation report published by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has said that a flight bound to Malaysia from Sydney, Australia, landed in Melbourne after its pilot entered wrong coordinates into the plane's internal navigation system.
Due to the incident that occurred last March, the Airbus A330 aircraft operated by AirAsia arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, nearly nine hours later.
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
After taking off from Sydney, Australia, the flight with 212 passengers flew in the wrong route and landed in Melbourne just after 2pm on 10 March last year.
The ATSB report stated that besides entering wrong combination of data, the flight crew made several other errors during the flight.
The problem began when captain and the first officer of the AirAsia flight had exchanged their pre-flight duties because of defective earmuffs.
The captain usually conducts an external inspection of the plane while the first officer stays in the cockpit to complete preparation procedures.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataAccording to the ASTB report, the pilot wrongly entered the longitude from a sign outside the cockpit window into the onboard system.
The ASTB report said: "This resulted in a positional error in excess of 11,000km (6,835 miles), which adversely affected the aircraft's navigation systems and some alerting systems.”
Even after receiving several message alerts and sounds mentioning the error before takeoff, the crew ignored them and lost various opportunities to rectify their mistakes.
By the time, the crew realised their mistake, it was too late to fix the system, stated the report.
An AirAsia representative was quoted by CNN as saying: "AirAsia X would like to stress that we have in place robust management systems to monitor and prevent similar incidents from reoccurring.
"We also wish to reiterate that we have regularly passed safety and security audits conducted by various international regulators. We remain committed to ensuring our compliance to all safety and security regulations."
Before departing for Kuala Lumpur, the aircraft spent three hours on the ground in Melbourne fixing the issue, reported the Guardian.
