I never cease to be amazed at the gems of flight safety stories that can be found if one has the time and inclination to browse through various Pprune forums.
Take this story found today on Aviation History and Nostalgia Forum titled
VARIG football-on-ADF Crash 1989? Seems a Boeing 737 crashed into the jungle after getting lost and running out of fuel.
There were rumours the crew may have been listening to a football match while conducting an ADF approach. Then someone placed a link to the accident report and the strangest story you could have ever imagined, came out. Considering this happened 29 years ago, many current pilots in Australia would not have been born when that accident happened. But there are still lessons to be learned from reading the story. In our current times of blind reliance on GPS derived tracks coupled with the ever-diminishing number of ground based navigation aids around Australia, the opportunity to cross-check initial departure tracks are limited to having an alert radar operator watching our progress rather than monitoring an RMI needle on a dial.
It all started when the captain mistakenly programmed his computer by inserting the wrong departure track and compounded this by selecting that track on his HSI before engine start. The first officer arrived in the cockpit after doing the walk-around and without first double checking the computer, looked across the cockpit and saw the track selected on the Captains HSI and copied it on to his own HSI. Today we call that complacency. History repeating itself.
Read on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_254