I'm a native spanish speaker, living in the Canary Islands. English is a foreign language to me.
Some politicians spoke of the airplane using up all available runaway before "taking off". This is obviously way exagerated, since as we all know, the airplane was briefly airbone and crashed some (gross wild estimate) at least +200m short of the end of the runaway, possibly as much as +600m away from the end of flat terrain.
Skid marks attributed to the fly show the plane landing on the strip for a short while, then turning (hard, about 45º) right and getting off of it by the side into adjacent terrain with still significant flat terrain in front (significant but definetly way short to stop).
A more credible account of someone metioning how the security video was explained to him by some other politician that saw it, says that the last portion of strip had the ground painted in a different color at the 600m mark off the official end of the runaway, but fails to mention if that part was just visible on the video or the airplane was actually still on ground trying to become airbone when that area was reached.
Regardless, it does seem the airplane took somewhat more airstrip to become airbone than usual, thus the politicians insisting that the plane "obviously looked like it lacked 'power' to take off".
About the wind direction and intensity, pilots flying nearby reported anywhere from 2-3 knots up to 9 knots of tail wind for that flypath. I'm personally assuming 7 knots from available information and definetly 9 at most. Wind seemed low and therefore "inconsistent", changing directions a bit, increasing, decreasing, etc. Outside air temperature was said to be 30ºC, but many pilots keep insisting that temperature just above the paviment can be as high as 10º more at midday. Regardless, Madrid heat during summer midday plus airport sea level elevation seem to call for air density on the low side of things.
Of course, reports (and reporters) have said all kinds of non-sense "24/7" since the accident. I'm dissmissing some of the obvious mistakes and exagerations that are being said and trying to report in english here those informations that seem to have more than one credible source commenting on them, while producing literal translations on those terms that are ambigous (such as talk about "available power" or "airplane falling" or "moving side-to-side") and more reasonable translations when the facts are clear and do not contradict the picture (like when they say there was a problem with the heater automatic on-off switch to then say that the probe, instead of the heater, was disconnected, which is probably a reporting error when it can be inferred in other reports that it was the heater that was disconected, hence the comment on fit-to-fly under no ice formation danger).
I do find english newpaper reports, such as those from the UK press, to be much more ambigous due not so much to slightly wrong translations (they usually fit the exact same reports from the spanish press word-by-word, as it should be, since the source is the same) as to take the comments either out-of-context or out-of-sequence (like with the survivors account of the happenings). I've seen plenty of that.
Survivors speak of things such as the airplane taking-off, moving (or falling) side-by-side soon thereafter, one wing moving way down, falling and crashing against the ground. Obviously their memories of the whole event is, on their own account, not all that clear. But two of the survivors talk roughly of the same event in the sense of "airbone", "side-to-side movement", "falling" or "wing falling" and they both kind-of-lose memory of the exact impact events until they wake up amid the debri. I don't think their recalls from the point when the ground was first hit on can be much trusted and actually slightly contradicted each other subtly as written by the reporters regarding hearing noise (i.e. one news report may lead to believe that a survivor heard a bang noise after the abrupt side-to-side movement but before falling while it's more likely it was heard as the plane hit the ground).
Last edited by justme69; 24th Aug 2008 at 11:38.