Emirates Flight 407

Investigation

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) performed the accident investigation. Central to the investigation was how the first officer had come to use the wrong aircraft weight, why that mistake was not picked up before takeoff, and why the flight crew had not realized the acceleration was much slower than expected until nearly entirely exhausting the 3.6 km runway.

Studies showed that aircrew could have difficulty recognising that incorrect data had been entered in avionic equipment, resulting in poor take-off performance. The ATSB issued a safety recommendation to the United States Federal Aviation Administration and a safety advisory notice to the International Air Transport Association and the Flight Safety Foundation. In addition, Airbus investigated the development of software to help pilots recognise unusual or poor performance on take-off.

In October 2011, the ATSB released their findings. They found that human error was the cause, and urged the development of technological aids that would alert pilots to incorrect data entry or insufficient take-off speed.

In response to the incident, Emirates reviewed its preflight procedures, mandating the duplication of laptop computers used for preflight planning so as to ensure dual data entry. They are also developing an avionics system for take-off acceleration-monitoring and alerting. Airbus updated its software to detect erroneous data. In October 2011, they announced plans to include a software program to calculate the required runway length. Furthermore, Airbus is developing a monitoring system to compute required acceleration rates and apply a "reasonableness test" to data input and alert the pilot to any potential errors.