Since somebody asked, the civil air accident commission in charge of the technical investigation for the accident (a judge is directing a parallel judiciary investigation) is required, by their own regulations, to make public a preliminary, FACTUAL (i.e. no conclusions or theories, only a list of all the facts which have been CONTRASTED to date) in about a month.
Their definition of "contrasted facts" is sort-of like this: If they find that there are say 4 ways to measure the airplane speed, say from ground radar data, FDR recorder, timing of video images and physical evidence in rests of some instrument found, they will NOT state the speed of the plane until ALL THE POSSIBLE SOURCES TO OBTAIN SUCH INFORMATION have been investigated. Once all possible sources are "done with", then they know they can not obtain any more information about that matter in any other way and publish the "fact" as to "the best of their knowledge".
If a specific event has only one source of possible information, they just state what that source says. But if that specific event can be "known" through 5 different ways, they will NOT talk about it until ALL 5 ways to verify it are investigated.
That's how the comission's secretary explained their "corroboration" process.
Some more info that have come up:
-Spanair communicated the airport operations center that it was planning on switching planes for that flight. Another airplane was selected and was going to take over. They finally called back and decided they didn't need to, as the fault (probe heater) was thought to have been fixed.
-Rescue operations were extremely fast, reaching the site within 5 minutes since the airport controllers noticed the accident (a witness video shows them arriving in a very short time).
-If traffic in Barajas airport would've continued normally, another runaway would've been used from that point on for take-off, due to the tail wind. The Spanair flight was the last one that was going to be allowed to take off in that direction/strip because of the changing weather conditions (wind).
-The judge has been told to expect to receive the recordings from CVR in less than a month.
-Doctors report all remaining hospitalized survivors doing better. Only one remains in very serious condition, but also recovering. Two survivors have been sent to other hospital from Madrid per their requests. One has flown to Las Palmas and another to a hospital in Finland.
-All victims finally identified in a reportly extremely difficulty process by forensic specialists, even with DNA tests, due to the state of some remains and many of the passengers being close relatives among them (brothers, entire families, etc). Also, one child victim was adopted and no DNA was available, so he had to be identified by exclusion and other means.
Last edited by justme69; 30th Aug 2008 at 07:57.