Code Chaos Over Hong Kong | The Near Crash Of Ethiopian Airlines 645

This is the story of ethiopian airlines flight 645. On the 18th of july 2019 a boeing 787 was flying from manilla ninoy international airport all the way to hong kong international airport. The flight was definitely medium haul and within a couple of hours the plane was getting close to hong kong international airport. Now the active runway for landings that day was runway 25 and getting to runway 25 required you to fly to the north then turn to the left and then intercept the localizer of runway 25. If you dont know the localizer is part of the ILS or instrument landing system that uses radio beacons to guide the planes to the runway. The ILS is made up of the glideslope and the localizer. The glideslope tells you if youre too high or too low on your way down to the runway and the localizer tells you where you are in relation to the runway horizontially. Both of them together keep you ontrack and gets you right down to the runway. For the ILS appraoch to runway 25 you needed to hit the way point named river and then intercept the localizer. This would help you line up with runway 25 and from there it would be a quick descent right down to the runway and bobs your uncle. The pilots of flioght 645 flew the aprpaoch into runway 25 and the plane was on autopilot as they approached the waypoint river. River was just 15 nautical miles from the runway so they were getting ready to put this plane on the ground. The autopilot put the plane into a slight left bank as it picked up the beacon on the ground. The plane started following the the beacons down to the runway. The landing was going smoothly. The pilots then quickly scanned their instruments and then came to a sobering realisation. The plane was not descending towards the runway it was headed straight for terrain. Somehow the plane had not lined up with the runway and had also descended well below the minimum safe altitude for the area which was set to 4300 feet. If you dont know the minimum safe altitude is the lowest altitude that youre allowed to descend to in a particular area if you go below that youre at high risk of flying into something like a mountain. That was the case for flight 645. They were in mountainous terrain and the pilots did not feel like finding out where the mountains were with their 787, they immeidaately disengaged the autopilot and took manual control of the plane. ATC noticed that flight 645 was no where near the extended center line of runway 25 and saw that they were headed right for terrain and ATC immediately asked them to go around. The pilots acted swiftly and commanded max thrust from the engines and climbed away from the mountains and out of danger.They made a second approach to runway 25, it doesnt say if it was a manual approach or an ILS one but regardless, they landed safely. Now you might want to know how how close the 787 got to any terrain well the lowest that they got was 3277 feet which is more than a thousand feet below their minimum descent altitude and the scary thing is that they missed a mountain by .3 miles. If they were .3 miles to the right then they would have flown right into a mountain. Which is absolutely scary to think about. Now you have to know the 787 so far at the time of recoding has an absolutely spotless safety record. There are literally thousands of 787s in service around the world and not one hull has been lost, sure they got grounded for a bit in 2013 due to lithium battery fires but it never took a plane down. Finding out why this happened would be key to keeping that safety record intact. Next time around there might not be two pilots who are as attentive or an ATC who kept as close watch as the one at hong kong. So they needed to get to the bottom of this.

When something like this happens a lot of things start happening, some people look at the plane to see if there was something there that could explain the deviation, some people will look at the navigational equipment to see if it sent the jet astray and then others will look through the the