Two events, though years apart and unrelated, have been a watershed in the recent history of aviation.

The most recent is the report released last week by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau on AirAsia X. The flight departed Sydney for Kuala Lumpur and instead ended up in Melbourne.

The report says that while logging in the global positioning system before the flight, the pilot omitted a zero in the longitude settings. The result is that the aircraft’s navigation system worked out the location of departure as being somewhere near Cape Town in South Africa.

Nothing seemed amiss at take-off, but unfortunately as it climbed to cruising altitude, the autopilot set course for a destination that left the crew baffled. The air traffic controllers at Sydney airport were first to notice that the aircraft was headed in the wrong direction, actually into the path of other planes scheduled for takeoff.

While it would normally have been easier for the pilot to turn around and land at Sidney airport, weather conditions had changed, with low clouds and rain making it impossible to visually spot the runway.

It took the intervention of air traffic controllers from both Sidney and Melbourne airports to get the aircraft back on the ground safely.

The captain of the flight, who has over 22,000 hours flying time, had to rely on his expertise and instructions from air traffic controllers to manually land the aircraft in Melbourne.

September 11

The other event, which occurred 15 years ago in the US in 2001 and commonly referred to as 9/11, greatly affected and will continue to influence how we fly.

In co-ordinated attacks, Al Qaeda-trained terrorists took command of four American Airlines aircraft in mid flight and crashed three of them into the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan, New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

But the heroic story of one man on the ground remains in the background. Ben Sliney, who at the time was in charge of air traffic control operations at the Federal Aviation Administration command centre in Herndon, took unprecedented action and grounded all aircraft in US air space.

This is documented in the 9/11 Commission report.

With over 4,000 aircraft airborne on the fateful day, Mr Sliney made a judgement call and grounded all aircraft in US airspace. Though an air traffic controller with over 25 years’ experience at the time, September 11 was Mr Sliney’s first day on the job as operations manager.

These two incidents show that there are very many factors that determine whether you will have a safe flight or not. Some of these factors are human and some mechanical, and not all humans who determine this have to necessarily be on board the aircraft.

Unknown to many passengers, pilots mostly fly blind, particularly in the event of navigation systems failure, hence the heavy reliance on air traffic controllers.

In any given flight, there is constant communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, with continuous updates and reports on speed, altitude and bearing.

The other group of people who ensure smooth flights are aircraft dispatchers. These are ground crew and are the ultimate nannies of flights, responsible for pre-flight arrangements.

Dispatchers map flight paths, key airports along the way including best possible alternative airports in case of an emergency.

Also referred to as “ground pilots,” they determine quantities of fuel required based on destination, passenger numbers and cargo loads while factoring in aircraft limitations and effects of weather.

They are held equally responsibly for flight safety with the pilot.

Your flight does not start when the pilots makes the grand entry into the airport. The flight crew always find their homework already done for them.

The next time you clap for the pilot for that smooth landing, spare a thought for the air traffic controllers and flight dispatchers who planned for, monitored and guided your flight the whole way.

Michael Otieno is an aviation consultant based in Nairobi. Twitter: @pmykee143, Email: [email protected].