Low-cost carrier AirAsia X is taking heat for after a flight from Kuala Lumpur International Airport landed at Gimpo International Airport in South Korea instead of its scheduled destination, Incheon Airport, according to news reports.
Originally scheduled to reach Incheon at 7.50pm on 13 August, AirAsia Flight D7 506 reportedly touched down at Gimpo, 35km from Incheon, at 8.08pm after circling in the air. Passengers on the flight said after the captain announced they had arrived at Incheon, people stood up to retrieve their bags from the overhead compartments, but some looked out of the windows and checked their phones, and realised they were at Gimpo.
“Everyone panicked. It seemed the cabin crew didn’t know we had landed at Gimpo until passengers told them,” Lee Mi-hyun, a passenger in her 40s who was returning from a trip to Malaysia with her husband and eight-year-old daughter, told The Korea Herald. “One crew member even said she needed to call her parents, who were waiting for her at Incheon International Airport.”
What caused the flight to divert to Gimpo was “turbulence” over Incheon Airport. The flight departed for Incheon about two hours later at 10.17pm after refuelling, according to the Korea Airports Corp.
“They appeared just as confused as the passengers. No water was offered and there was almost no food left on board, leaving passengers with children upset. Some even said they would rather get off at Gimpo before the plane departed for Incheon,” Lee said.
“During the two hours before we departed for Incheon again, there was no clear explanation of what caused the landing error or any effort to reassure passengers,” another passenger told The Korea Herald.
In a statement on Aug 14, AirAsia X clarified that the flight was diverted to Gimpo for refuelling following air traffic congestion at Incheon due to adverse weather conditions.
AirAsia X (AAX) said flight D7506 diverted to Gimpo International Airport (GMP) earlier in the evening for refuelling following air traffic congestion at ICN due to adverse weather conditions. The airline said “a miscommunication occurred in the cabin crew announcement upon landing, which the captain promptly clarified, confirming the diversion to Gimpo Airport due to adverse weather and refuelling. The captain also apologised to guests for the inconvenience, reassuring them that the landing at Gimpo was to to refuel and that the aircraft will proceed to its original destination.
Benyamin Ismail, the CEO of AirAsia X said: “This was an unforeseen situation caused by adverse weather in Incheon. Following the potential delay and the risk of landing with fuel below requirement, the aircraft was diverted to Gimpo International Airport in the interest of safety for refuelling. Upon completing all safety procedures, the aircraft subsequently took off for Incheon International Airport, where guests eventually disembarked. We will also review our internal announcements and onboard information-sharing processes to ensure greater clarity in such situations. We thank our guests for their understanding and cooperation during this operational adjustment, which was necessary to ensure the safety of everyone on board. As a good will gesture, AAX will be extending travel vouchers and will be reaching out to the affected guests directly.”
This is not the first time AirAsia has gotten the wrong airport. In 2015, an AirAsia flight from Sydney to Malaysia ended up in Melbourne instead when the pilot entered the wrong coordinates into the internal navigation system, an air safety investigation found. The Airbus A330 was scheduled to leave Sydney international airport at 11.55am on 10 March 2015, and arrive in Kuala Lumpur just under nine hours later. Instead, through a combination of data entry errors, crew ignoring unexplained chimes from the computer system, and bad weather in Sydney, it landed in Melbourne just after 2pm.
Melbourne airport is 722km southwest of Sydney. Kuala Lumpur is 6,611km northwest.
According to a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) the problem occurred when faulty headsets prompted the captain and first officer to swap their usual pre-flight checks. Ordinarily, the report said, the captain would conduct an external inspection of the plane while the first officer stayed in the cockpit and, among other tasks, completed the position initialisation and alignment procedures.
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I have flown over 100 times with AirAsia & have only been delayed over 10 minutes once. Leaving KL for Sydney & there was a typhoon in the Andaman Sea & another in the Phillipines…good reason for that one! Give me AirAsia over Jetstar any day, I haven’t been on Jetstar that was less than 10 minutes late…8 hours was the worst.
This is standard AirAsia procedure:
Pretend that nothing is wrong when there is obviously something wrong, then tell the passengers nothing and offer them zero compensation for their trouble. This is how AirAsia evades responsibility for anything that can go wrong with a flight and so they are able to still provide very cheap airfares without losing money. I fly AirAsia a lot and I like the low prices, but also I’m aware that if things go wrong I will not be compensated. I was once refused boarding to an AirAsia flight because they overbooked the flight and there were not enough seats for everyone. They did put us passengers that didn’t fit on the next flight, but it was 36 hours later and they didn’t give us a hotel for the night, so I had to sleep on the floor inside the KLIA2 airport.
You get what you pay for. Budget is low-cost, but very low-service also.
I hear you. I flew AirAsia one time from Singapore to KL. Experience was so bad I skipped the flight home from KL and hired a car and a driver and drove to Singapore. It was about a 4-5 hour drive but it was worth it not to have to fly on AirAsia.