SCQ instead of SVQ

[hetfield]

SPANAIR landed in Santiage de Compostella instead of Sevilla!?

Anyone who knows better?

[RogerIrrelevant69]

Easily done, only about 500nm apart!

[Demented]

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.

[RobertK]

So...how can the pilots confuse two IATA codes, when they (and all their charts) are using ICAO codes?

Regards,

Robert

[Vapor]

Which airport was the flightplan too?

[TopBunk]

One would have thought that the flight log details would have specified the route to be flown. Maybe they have stored routes that went to both places and they didn't cross check to the flight plan.

Either way, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where being Swedish comes into it.... waypoint AAAAA, Airway XXXX Waypoint BBBBB, etc , destination.

[Trentino]

I would suspect that going to the wrong airport is hard to do and maybe just maybe the pilots arent 100 percent to blame
there are soooo many damn links in the chain

I mean if one is shooting a visual approach to the wrong airport and landing there then yes the pilots are to blame

but

to travel soo far offcourse and land hundreds of miles away can only be accomplished with the help of despatch and many others

cheers

[Jando]

Hehe, look at your keyboard: SCQ and SVQ and on many (most?) keyboards the C is right next to the V - I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a typo ...

[fox niner]

Probably the guys up front loaded their FMS wrongly. In my airline a stored flightplan from Athens to Amsterdam, for example, would require us to type ATHAMS01, or ATHAMS02 and so on. This is then inserted in the route INIT page. (the company route)

Now, if the guys up front were from Sweden, and don't know the difference between SVQ and SCQ, they could have typed:

BCNSCQ01 in stead of BCNSVQ01

which will take the airplane on the company route from Barcelona to Santiago...oops
The plane will go to the wrong airfield.

typical human mistake anyone can make. Luckily a mistake with a happy ending!

[RobertK]

And they simply overlooked the documents, charts and weather reports dispatch gave them?
Sorry, I find that rather hard to believe.

IMHO the guy who made the press statement was a "little" lax and kindly overlooked just how many people belong to the project of getting an airliner from A to B.
Or he just wanted to save the face of the Spanair employees, instead blaming the guys who were only leased.

Regards,

Robert

[hetfield]

Who went (some years ago) to EBBR instead of EDDF, hrrrm...?

[ATC Watcher]

Originally Posted by hetfield

Who went (some years ago) to EBBR instead of EDDF, hrrrm...?

That one is a prime example still used in many presentations to show how a tiny initial error with a Flight data assistant between Shannon and London and 12 other small errors , each perfectly understandable taken alone, caused this .
The only mistakes ( in my view ) the Capt made was not to go around when he realised it was not FRA, and not realising the flight time difference, but after a NAT crossing so early in the morning , who can say it wont' happen to him ? I was told that it cost him his carreer and sadly also that of the young lady FO.

Back to Nordic and Spanair, I also think that the city codes confusion was most certainly made much earlier on, probably with a " correct " Flight plan to Sevilla sent to IFPS, otherwise ATC would not corrolate the flight. But this is my guess.

[pilot11]

They got flightplans to the wrong destination... Hard to know if it is right on a sub-lease.

Link to statement in swedish newspaper: http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=563806

[Mr Pax]

Lucky they did not type in SRQ they would have had a long flight!!

MP

[FOUR REDS]

This very much looks like a journo story.....

QOUTE:

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.

AND

Some of the passengers had wondered why the plane headed west of the Mediterranean Sea on route for Barcelona.

Who issued the PLOG and FPLN? What did these state?

[Doors to Automatic]

Originally Posted by hetfield

Who went (some years ago) to EBBR instead of EDDF, hrrrm...?

That was a NW DC-10 flight about 10 years ago I believe. One shouldn't laugh but I found it hilarious that the cabin crew and passengers were following the progress of the flight into Brussels on the Airshow and the only three people on board who didn't know where they were, were the three people flying the plane!

[Globaliser]

Originally Posted by Doors to Automatic

One shouldn't laugh but I found it hilarious that the cabin crew and passengers were following the progress of the flight into Brussels on the Airshow and the only three people on board who didn't know where they were, were the three people flying the plane!

If - speculating a bit - the tech crew correctly operated the BCN-SVQ flight plan that they'd been given to the extent of announcing pre-takeoff what they weather was is Seville (as reported elsewhere), then it sounds like there may be similarities between the two incidents. Two parallel universes on board the same aircraft, divided by the flight deck door. While these incidents are funny and not unsafe in themselves, shouldn't this ring some flight safety bells?

[hetfield]

Sevilla - RWY 07/25
Santiago de Compostella - RWY 17/35

???

[Taildragger67]

Incorrect flight plan entry...

Just lucky there wasn't a big hill in the way .

RIP TE901.

[bia botal]

What about the SID, TOC check, en route fuel checks ref way-points, radio freq.not as per en route charts, approach plates, radio freq for approuch etc etc etc.......

lets face it they just f*$#ed up.