Tablet computer zoom error saw plane fly 13 hours with 46cm hole

A Qatar Airways Boeing 777 travelling from Miami to Doha struck airport lights during takeoff and suffered a 46 cm tear in the fuselage, thanks in part to a pilot zooming in too far on a tablet computer.

Flight QR778 left Miami on September 15th but as it took off, hit airport landing lights. On arrival the plane was found to have suffered “a 46 cm tear in the fuselage behind the rear cargo door which breached the pressure vessel... numerous dents and scratches in the external airframe with 18 square meters of damaged skin.” Inspection also found “90 external individual areas of damage requiring assessment and rectification [and] some damage to a metal guard on the left landing gear.”

A Qatar Civil Aviation Authority (QCAA) report on the incident suggests the crew were not familiar with the airport, so when the First Officer decided to take off from a point 411m down the runway the choice was queried but “The commander made a hand gesture and said something which he thought was seeking reassurance from the crew that everything was OK.”

Deciding to take off 411m down the runway seems to have been a spur-of-the-moment decision, possibly justified by the fact that the touchdown point on the runway is at that location. A great many runways thresholds are in the same spot as the touchdown point. But the pilot was unaware that the runway's threshold was 411m away and that selecting the wrong takeoff spot was depriving it of useful parts of the runway.

A tablet computer contributed to that misunderstanding. The QCAA report says the flight's commander “was using his EFB, selected to the airport diagram plate, to assist with his navigation around the airfield.”

An EFB, or “Electronic Flight Bag”, is a system that places all the documents pilots need in a tablet computer instead of a weighty bag full of printed material. Using an EFB is standard practice on many airlines.

But on QR778 the Commander “had the screen ‘zoomed in’, so he could clearly see the names of the taxiways as he passed them, although the scale selected, the size of his screen and the position of the chart, meant he was unable to see where he was in relation to the runway threshold.”

If the tablet had been zoomed out a little further, the commander would have been able to see the proper takeoff point.

The good news is that the flight made it to Doha without incident. The bad news is that the crew's unfamiliarity with the airport and poor communication in the cockpit led to the shorter-than-optimal takeoff run. Crew did query the commander's choice of takeoff location, but he “made a hand gesture and said something which he thought was seeking reassurance from the crew that everything was OK.” The rest of the crew assumed that meant the takeoff had been calculated to take place at the chosen point, when that was not the case.

Qatar Airways is a known customer of Boeing company Jeppesen, a provider of Jeppesen runs on Windows 8, “classic Windows” and iOS. The QCAA hasn't said which operating system was used in the cockpit. Whatever it was, the ultra-cautious world of air travel takes incidents of this type very seriously. Qatar Airways will, The Register expects, tweak its procedures to greatly reduce the likelihood that another such incident could occur and that tablet computers don't contribute to future dangers.

Such actions were implemented after a flight in Australia struck the runway after a fat-fingered data entry error on an iPad. ®