ENG15WA019 · Airbus A330 - 201
Airbus A330 - 201 · Incident: navigation system malfunction/failure en route
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG15WA019
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Unknown
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
Airbus A330 - 201
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A330
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- F-GRSQ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Not recorded
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · cruise
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Navigation system malfunction/failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Athens, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On 12/26/2014 an Airbus A330 operated by XL Airways took off from La Réunion (Indian Ocean) to Marseille (France). The information provided by the three inertial reference systems became successively unavailable, leading autopilot + auto-thrust to disconnect, and attitude and navigation information to be lost. The crew diverted to Athens (Greece) using back-up instruments and flight controls direct law and landed uneventfully in good weather conditions.
The incident is being investigated by the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile (BEA). The NTSB has been appointed an Accredited Representative to assist the BEA in the investigation as the state of design of the Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU).
All inquiries concerning this accident should be directed to the BEA at:
Aéroport du Bourget Zone Sud – Btiment 153 200 rue de Paris 93352 Le Bourget Cedex France Tél. : +33 1 49 92 72 00 Fax : +33 1 49 92 72 03 Website: www.bea.aero
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG15WA019
- Event ID
- 20150504X25731
- Case number
- ENG15WA019
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9f5c542573401178ab62dcce27f8163dae60340b8e0b657f8689a1e531cb3248; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:16:50.678Z.