Originally Posted by
Cleared4appch
I think you may have over analyzed this one. It seems pretty clear that they were instructed to make a left turn to 105 after takeoff. They clearly made the turn in that direction, but continued through the heading instead of rolling out on it. While continuing the turn, the controller queried them to see if they were flying the assigned 105 heading, as it appeared they weren’t. Instead of correcting back to the right to the 105 heading, they continued to make the left hand turn to the north for some weird reason that nobody knows.
It’s possible they were thinking “maybe the controller wants us to make a left hand turn more than 180 degrees and go the long way to roll out on the 105 heading.” If so they should have asked the controller for clarification early on instead of continuing past 105.
I suspect there was A LOT more going on in that flight deck that we don’t know about. Sounds like the PM was the FO and the captain was PF. I could be wrong but that’s what I suspect.
I could be for sure, just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt with reasonable confusion of 150, 015, and 105.
Another thought was someone took the HSI out of MAG leaving New York, and it never got put back. And the HSI decayed and they didn’t notice before takeoff roll it didn’t match runway heading.
Maybe they just pressed the heading button to sink the bug and took off.
It’s hard to slew the HSI 10 degrees nose up climbing or or while accelerating. Dropping the switch directly to mag could have swung it too much for them to maintain confidence it was correct.