Na... I dont think this is right. If they had an ATC fllightplan which they did, then ATC would have prompted them surley. How about someone filed the wrong fpl and gave the flightcrew wrong plogs and off they went... or someone boarded the wrong pax on the the wrong aircraft... but I dont belive someone just punched the wrong letter and off they went...

Nope, I don't think they did either. If their system is anything like ours - and who knows what's out there - when we load the FMS, it has to ALL be crosschecked by both crew: filed routing, each waypoint, and total distance. If you typed in the wrong destination identifier, unless it was with a couple miles of the right destination, it would bear no resemblance to the flight release.

Seems more likely they were dispatched to the wrong airport, pure and simple. I could see how a dispatcher could make a typo in their software, and then the comp would pull up all the possible routing possibilities. Then performance, fuel, etc computations made for that route...

And with it being leased, if the dispatcher and crew were unfamiliar with the destination and surrounding geography, they wouldn't recognize the error. Heck we had a pax who bought a ticket for Palm Springs, CA and was quite surprised to disembark at West Palm Beach, FL!!
:ok:

I'm quite sure that the flight was dispathed to Seville from the beginning, it is almost impossible that it was a chain of small or big errors after takeoff.

One of the possible scenarios explaining how it happend could be that dispatch and ops support for this flight was done by Nordic ops from homebase, which is very often the way of doing wetlease operations. Normally the lessee (Spanair in this case) is just sending the daily plan for aircraft to lessor's (Nordic) operations office, and lessor's ops are preparing all docs, filing flight plans, sending crew brief etc. Someone in Nordic ops got a daily plan including BCN-SCQ-BCN and mistakenly read in his mind as "Barcelona-Seville-Barcelona". Next minute he started to prepare plogs/fpl/wx/etc for SVQ, because he remembered that he read Seville!

All above is pure speculation however based on my personal experience of doing wetlease business this could be quite close to the truth (we had a couple of close calls similar to this :ouch: .. Dhaka and Doha sound similar to each other over a bad phone line, and DC10F can easily make any of them from Athens... :oh:

Several years ago, when SAS operated DC9 freighters they sent the CPH-HEL aircraft to MAN, and the CPH-MAN aircraft to HEL.

As it is obvious to me that not all understood the report in the swedish newspaper that was linked to in an earlier post, i'll roughly translate the important bit:


So, someone ****** up, but it wasn't the pilots...

Some thoughts:

- on the ground, getting clearance more often than not your destination is read as a word 'seville' or 4 letter icao code. Never the IATA code.

- the keyboard on the FMC isn't going to be QWERTY, so C and V aren't next to each other

- ATC would be clearing you to the exit point (or some point on the way there) based on the FPL they have in the system. You couldn't go completely the wrong way 'by mistake'

etc.

I reckon whoever mentioned the wet leasing 'plan' being sent over and mistyped is pretty much on the money!

NW3

Reading the report in the swedish newspaper, I agree with "The Bartender". The pilots where told to go to Seville, their flightplan had Seville as destination, so they went according to flightplan. The guy making the mistake was one of the regulars in ops but it's easier blaming the pilots from out of country. :*

If the pilots didn't do wrong it would be time for SPANAIR to straighten it up......

ATC
 

What about ATC?, they have the flightplan and the points to leave their sectors, and the route is so different from Santiago than Seville... The clearance?, the Operational Flight plan?... so many points to check and avoid mistakes, but at the end they did it, An interesting mistake to analize in order to avoid future situations like that...

Did you even bother to read any of the posts in the thread?

As a dispatcher (the kind that plans/files the flight plan here in the US, and not the kind of dispatcher that you deal with at the gate in the UK and elsewehere), I'd readily concur that it's probably a flight planning error, and not a crew or ATC error.

Typos are very easy to make. When they're made on VORs, there error usually reveals itself quickly via a big difference in fuel burn/ETE. One guy coming out of Chicago to LAX recently (usually via RBS, to the south) told us ATC was sending him to Moline and read it off as MOL. MOL is, of course, Montebello, VA (south of the Washington DC area), and was one heck of a zig before zagging back westward towards LAX. Putting the correct "MZV" in for Moline fixed that one.

Based upon how an outfit's computer system is set-up, making typos on destinations can be easy to do, or precluded entirely. Our system is set-up for the latter, by use of city-pairs, and as such, the destination is hard-coded. We obviously have the ability to go from A-B via Podunk, or via BFE, or any other route we choose, but the destination is already in there, immune from fat-fingered humans.

I made some enquiries.

It turns out that the dispatch release, computer and ATC flight plans were all prepared by Nordic in Sweden and sent to Spanair dispatch office in BCN to hand them over to the crew. That's a fact, and so it wasn't the pilots but Nordic's operations dispatchers who made the mistake.

The flight did not match the crew's roster and that should have raised a flag, but since both destinations are in Spain, both are served by Spanair and flight time from BCN is similar, the pilots may not have noticed. ATC simply gave the clearance to the filed destination and the flight followed its flight plan.

It would be unthinkable for anyone at Spanair, or anywhere else in Spain to mistake SVQ for SCQ or viceversa.

"errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum": "to err is human; to persist is of the Devil". In Spain and elsewhere.

The Hawk

Point taken. Yet I think it's extremely unlikely for this kind of mistake to take place in Spain, where both names/codes are very familiar.

So Spanair dispatchers simply picked up heap of paper that came in throught the fax and handed it over to Nordic crew without even checking what's written on it? Error of omission if you ask me.
Or rather it would be unthinkable for anyone at Spanair, or anywhere else in Spain to admit (s)he made a mistake. I'm not saying that mistake was made in Spain but this attitude reeks of someone who never underwent proper CRM trainning. Mistakes happen and what matters is error management! Have you ever heard of a typo? Look down on your keyboard and tell me how far are C and V.

What really happened
 

Hi everyone,
What really happened is that the pilots were told to fly the aircraft to Santiago, SCQ. They got dispatched for that, got ATC clearance to SCQ and landed were it was initially scheduled for. So no mistake has been done at all from the pilots.

The mistakes were made by OW- Crew control and flight dispatcher that forgot to inform the pilots about the new destination.

Thanks for all of you that did not blame the pilots so easily; by the way, they are GREAT PILOTS!

Rwy in Seville 09/27
Rwy in Santigo 17/35