Pilot Flies Plane In Wrong Direction: Realizes The Situation After 8 Minutes

We all take a wrong turn now and then, but going back on the right route is way easier when you’re on the ground and you’re not flying a huge piece of mechanical ingenuity thousands of miles above it.

Eight minutes into a flight that took off from a New Zealand airport, the pilot of a Malaysia Airlines plane realized something was wrong – the plane was heading in the wrong direction.

According to the New Zealand media, flight MH132 took off from Auckland airport to Kuala Lumpur on Christmas Day at 2.23am, and was going south towards Melbourne.

The pilot of the MH132 suddenly became curious as to why the plane was not taking a more direct route, so he contacted air traffic controllers in Auckland. He decided to steer the plane across the Tasman Sea and headed north-west to the destination, the Malaysian capital.

The air navigation service provider in the region stated that it was investigating the incident, but concluded that there were no apparent safety concerns. “The flight plan the airline filed with us was going to Kuala Lumpur but via a slightly different route than the pilot was expecting,” a spokesperson for the organization, Airways, revealed.

Peter Clark, an aviation expert, said that planes often travel via Australia’s south to avoid bad weather and headwinds. According to him, “the pilot was probably not used to going that far south and has done a very good job by noticing it, questioning it, and not just blindly flying off only to end up in the Southern Ocean.”