Flight 254

I’ve been thinking about cognitive failure of various kinds a lot lately, and I ran into this case.

Note that this involved an 180-mile flight pretty much due north to one of Brazil’s largest cities. The pilot misread the autopilot setting and flew due west for a couple of hours, before he and the first officer finally noticed that something seemed amiss. How you can fly directly into the sun at sunset when you’re supposed to be flying due north is just one of the many questions posed here.