Skip to main content

How a small typo landed a commercial plane in the wrong country

A pilot landing a passenger plane in the wrong city sounds bad enough, but in the wrong country? Yes, it happened.

Detailed in a report released this week by Australia’s aviation agency, the bizarre AirAsia flight, which had 212 passengers on board, was the result of a catalog of errors that began before the aircraft had even left the ground.

The incident took place in March last year and was largely the result of the captain entering the wrong co-ordinates into the Airbus A330’s flight system shortly before take-off.

Instead of entering the longitude as 151° 9.8’ east, or “15109.8”, the pilot mistakenly input 15° 19.8’ east, or “01519.8”. This had the effect of making the aircraft think it was in Cape Town, South Africa, 6800 miles away. But it was in Sydney.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said the crucial typo “adversely affected the aircraft’s navigation functions, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and some electronic centralised aircraft monitoring alerts.” In other words, there was no way this plane was going to Malaysia.

The ATSB’s report said the aircraft’s safety systems gave the pilots several chances early on “to identify and correct the error,” but they failed to realize anything was amiss until the plane began tracking in the wrong direction when the autopilot engaged shortly after departure.

And this is where the story gets a bit scary. As the plane diverted from its originally intended course almost immediately after take-off, it crossed over a parallel runway just several hundred feet from the ground. Fortunately it managed to avoid any close encounters with other aircraft in the vicinity.

Once in the air, the pilots attempted to correct the situation. However, they were unable to do so as the cause of the problem still wasn’t clear to them.

Believing the safest course of action would be to land as soon as possible, the captain asked to return to Sydney. But after informing air traffic control that issues with the plane’s navigation system meant they could only land via a visual approach, the pilots were ordered to divert to Melbourne because of poor weather and low visibility. The plane landed safely in Melbourne a couple of hours later.

The entire episode could’ve been avoided if the plane had been upgraded with Airbus’s latest flight management system, which would’ve spotted and prevented the data entry error. AirAsia has since performed the upgrade to its fleet.

As for the passengers, it’s not reported when they finally made it to Malaysia.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more