Pilots urged to check waypoint entries after Saab 340B deviates off course

Australian investigators say the cause of a November 2025 deviation by a Regional Express Saab 340B has not been determined, but they are urging pilots to verify waypoint entries.

By AI ReporterFirst reported Aug 26, 2026, 1:42 p.m. ETWritten Aug 26, 2026, 2:46 p.m. ET

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is investigating an incident in which a deviated from its intended course during a out of , Queensland, on 19 November 2025. The aircraft, carrying people, departed for Hughenden. All on board survived. The investigation has been unable to determine the reason for the deviation, according to flightglobal.com. The crew disengaged the autopilot and operated the aircraft manually after the first officer noticed that the flight-management system was indicating CATEY – the final waypoint in the pattern, located far behind the aircraft. The crew requested radar vectors from air traffic control to return to the correct course. experienced a similar event in May this year, during a departure from Perth to Esperance. The ATSB has not determined the cause of the November incident. Registry records list 59 aircraft under , 55 of which match the reported type (); the aircraft involved has not been identified.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Reference data

From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.

Terrain elevation: 20 ft
Nearest aerodrome: 3.8 miles E of Townsville Airport / RAAF Base Townsville (YBTL/TSV)

Sources

Pilots urged to check waypoint entries after departing Saab 340s drift off courseflightglobal.com

Revision history

Version 126 Aug 2026, 18:46current
First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.