Madrid - Passengers on a Spanish airline Spanair internal flight ended up in Seville instead of Santiago de Compostela after a pilot confused the two cities' codes, reports said on Tuesday.
The Spanair flight from Barcelona landed in the country's south, 700 kilometres from scheduled destination in north-west Spain, much to the surprise of the 95 passengers.
According to Tuesday's press reports, Spanair explained the mistake by saying that the Swedish crew had mixed up the codes for the airports. The code for Santiago was SCQ and Seville's was SVQ.
Spanair had leased the plane along with its crew from Nordic Airways partner in Sweden. The fact that the pilot and the crew were not Spanish speakers did not help matters, the reports said.
Some of the passengers had wondered why the plane headed west of the Mediterranean Sea on route for Barcelona.
After the mix-up, the passengers were flown from Seville to their original destination.
