TheFlightDispatcher.com

At 30,000 ft above the bare, light brown-green dotted landscape of eastern Turkey, taken aback, the captain asked the Iraqi ATC controller to repeat his last transmission. The controller, somewhat hesitant, contributed to the tension that had just started to rise in the cockpit.

“Your permission is to fly to Baghdad, not Najaf, sir,” he said in hardly intelligible English.

Puzzled, the captain pulled out the OFP file—good old-school days, when everything was on paper. To his astonishment, the cover of the file mentioned the correct registration of the aircraft, YR-XXX. The content, however, was computed for YR-XXY. Luckily, XXY was the same plane type as XXX, although with a slightly different fuel burn.

The flight plan was from LRCK to ORNI. Both ICAO codes, as written on the paper, had no explanatory airport names under the four-letter designations.

The captain pulled out the Middle East Jeppesen volume and peered inside. There it was: Baghdad – ORBI, Al Najaf – ORNI. Luckily for them, Najaf was further south than Baghdad, and the fuel they had was calculated for a longer trip.

The captain, an old, seasoned hand, asked the purser to call the sergeant in charge of the GIs in the back.

“You guys going to Baghdad or Najaf?”

“Baghdad, why?”

“Oh, nothing, just double-checking,” said the captain, displaying an innocent smile when he saw the inquisitive look on the sergeant’s face.

Now that things were clear, he pulled out the ENR charts, asked his copilot to draw up a new route, and reprogrammed the old-fashioned FMC to the correct destination.

You have no idea what Dispatch heard on the phone after the plane landed in Baghdad and the captain managed to get access to a landline from the airport’s briefing office.

And yes, it was the same company with the 1-ton pens.

A few days later, the OFP format also included the NAME of the airport, and everybody in Dispatch developed a near-religious habit of triple-checking the flight files.

The only question that remains is how the crew didn’t notice at least one of the errors before the flight.