Captain Realizes His Co-Pilot is Still in Training Only After Packed Airbus A320 Departs For Paris, Plane Makes Unscheduled Return

The Captain of a packed Airbus A320 flying from Malta to Paris Charles de Gaulle only realized that the First Officer was still in training and shouldn’t have been working with him until the plane was already in the air.

The incident occurred on April 18 but is now only coming to light after the specifics of what happened in the cockpit were reported by the Aviation Herald.

According to this report, the incident occurred on a KM Malta Airlines flight reporting from Malta to Paris as flight KM-478 last Saturday, which took off from Malta International Airport at around 6:20 am.

Data supplied by Flight Radar 24 shows that the aircraft climbed to a cruising altitude of around 34,000 feet as it headed northbound towards France.

But as the aircraft reached the coast of Sicily, the pilots suddenly turned around and started to head back towards Malta. It can now be revealed the cause of the diversion.

It turns out that as the plane was cruising towards Paris, the Captain and First Officer were engaged in a fairly routine conversation when it emerged that the co-pilot was still in training.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, or even uncommon, but it does require the First Officer to be accompanied by a training Captain or instructor. In this case, the Captain did not hold either of these qualifications and wasn’t meant to be supervising the First Officer.

Rather than carrying on with the flight, the Captain decided the best course of action would be to return to Malta so that the airline could recrew the flight with pilots who had the correct qualifications.

There’s some debate as to who is to blame for this mix-up, although it appears that the ultimate responsibility rests with KM Malta Air’s crew scheduling department, who should have assigned the correct pilots based on their respective qualifications.

KM Malta Air is the government-owned national flag carrier of Malta and shouldn’t be confused with Malta Air, which is a privately owned subsidiary of Ryanair.

KM Malta Air was created in 2024 because the European Union refused a request by the Maltese government to pump an additional €290 million of state aid into its predecessor airline.

While the now-defunct Air Malta was effectively shuttered, the government simply started a new airline with the same staff and aircraft – essentially what the Italian government did when it closed Alitalia and started ITA Airways.