AirAsia flight to Malaysia lands in Melbourne as pilot enters wrong coordinates

An AirAsia flight from Sydney to Malaysia landed in Melbourne after the pilot entered the wrong coordinates, a report has concluded.

The flight on 10 March 2015 was due to leave Sydney International Airport at 11.55am and arrive in Kuala Lumpur less than nine hours later.

However the pilot manually entered the wrong longitude for the journey - 15109.8 east (151° 9.8’ east), instead of 01519.8 east (15° 19.8’ east).

This resulted in "a positional error of 11,000km, which adversely affected the aircraft's navigation systems and some alerting systems".

The report issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) on Wednesday said the captain and first officer "had a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error", but failed to notice the warning signs.

Their attempts to troubleshoot and rectify the problem once airborne "resulted in further degradation of the navigation system, as well as to the aircraft’s flight guidance and flight control systems."

The plane was not fitted with "automatic correction of manual error" and the crew were denied the option to return to Sydney as the weather had deteriorated.

Air traffic control instead diverted the aircraft to Melbourne, where it landed shortly after 2pm.

It took ground staff three hours to fix the problem in Melbourne, before it was allowed to continue its journey to Kuala Lumpur - landing six hours behind schedule.

The ATSB recommended AirAsia upgrade its flight systems to assist in either preventing or detecting errors in future.