SCQ instead of SVQ
 

SPANAIR landed in Santiage de Compostella instead of Sevilla!?

Anyone who knows better?

Easily done, only about 500nm apart!

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. :\

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

Regards,

Robert

Which airport was the flightplan too?

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.

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

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 ... :)

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!:ok:

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

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.

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

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

MP

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?

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!

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?

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

???

Incorrect flight plan entry...

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

RIP TE901.

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.

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