The pilots of a TAP Air Portugal Airbus A330-900neo departing Los Angeles (LAX) for Lisbon (LIS) struggled to follow basic instructions, and made two mistakes just shortly after takeoff. Worst of all, the pilot working the radios was rather arrogant about it as well…
LAX ATC asks TAP Air Portugal pilots “are you okay?”
YouTube channel You can see ATC has the air traffic control audio and a visualization of an incident that happened on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, involving a TAP Air Portugal plane departing Los Angeles. The tower controller cleared the plane for takeoff on runway 24L, and the pilots were instructed to initially fly to the DLREY fix.
The pilots then contacted the departures controller, though at this point they were flying the incorrect departure, as they turned south significantly earlier than they were supposed to. This can quickly become dangerous, given that LAX frequently has narrowly spaced departures from different runways.
The air traffic controller noticed the plane’s incorrect turn, and then told the pilots to turn right to a heading of 250 immediately. A short while later, the departure controller confronted the pilots about the departure, asking “your plane took a really steep south turn there for some reason, is everything okay?”
One of the pilots responded that “we had been given ORCKA FIVE departure before, so we were executing ORCKA FIVE SID.” The departure controller simply responded with “that’s not even close.” Okay, we’ll talk more about that in a second, but things got worse.
At that point, while flying westbound, the TAP Air Portugal pilots were given the instructions to turn left, flying a heading of 090. They read that back correctly (including turning left rather than turning right), only to… turn right.
The controller then had to call the pilots to tell them to stop their turn, and remind them that they were headed in the wrong direction, and should be turning left, and not right. Once again, the controller asked the pilot “are you okay?” The response was “I’ve already replied to that message, we are okay.” Lol, that’s a lot of pride for some pilots who are struggling to fly their plane.
Eventually the plane got on the right course, and the flight continued without incident, though they were given a number to call for a possible pilot deviation.
How did the TAP Air Portugal pilots screw up the departure?
It would appear that what happened here is that the pilots had programmed the departure for runway 25R instead of runway 24L into their system. The ORCKA FIVE departure applies for all runways, and eventually it has all planes flying toward the ORCKA fix. However, you first need to fly either direct to DLREY if you’re departing from 24L, or DOCKR if you’re departing from 25R.
So clearly right after takeoff they were flying toward the waypoint for the wrong runway. That’s further supported by them actually not reading back that DLREY instruction to air traffic control with their takeoff clearance.
To then follow that up by turning right instead of left when being given a specific instruction is rather embarrassing. And to top it all off, that pilot strikes me as being quite arrogant. He should be apologetic and not proud. Right, you’ve already replied to the message about being okay, only to make another mistake just seconds later.
The departure controller was super professional, and then even spelled out the next fix, which was probably smart.
Bottom line
The pilots of a TAP Air Portugal Airbus A330-900neo departing Los Angeles struggled to follow basic instructions. First they made a wrong turn immediately after takeoff, as they weren’t flying toward the correct fix. Then moments later when they were being given explicit turn instructions, they turned right instead of left.
It’s kind of rough when the controller has to ask you twice if you’re okay, though the arrogance with which the pilot responded the second time (“I’ve already replied to that message”) is kind of rough, heh.
What do you make of this TAP Air Portugal LAX departure?
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