A smaller newspaper, el periodico de Aragón, writes:
"First discoveries: The investigators found the wings of the MD-82 with the flaps retracted (not deployed). That was the first indication that the accident could've originated on some failure to deploy them. It is virtually impossible that they retracted due to the impact. In fact, the experts believe that it was the cause of the accident, that can be seen on a video from an Aena (airport) camera, which would fit the hypothesis. The airplane reaches almost the end of the runaway ... and when it finally leaves the ground it does it with the nose pointing up too much, which produces that the engines enter stall (they lose thrust due to lack of air flow) and the plane falls down after several oscillating rolls.
They article implies that the analysis of the FDR still hasn't been received from the labs.
Pieces of the airplane (wings, engines) have already been dissasembled part by part, examined, and reassembled in a hangar as part of the investigation.
Only one of the many cameras that Aena was suppossed to have around the area captured the accident. And even then, only the last seconds of it. Seven seconds which don't show the actual crash itself (i.e. it doesn't show much later than when the airplane leaves the inmediate whereabouts of the runaway). It's a fixed angled camera located in the South Tower. The video HAS LEAKED TO THE PRESS and they have been abled to examine it frame-by-frame.
Airplane enters the right part of the image and at about that same time it lifts the nose up quite steeply, while the bottom wheels are still on the ground. They have a hard time, even on a magnified and paused view of the frame, to even be able to tell if the back wheels were fully off the ground or not, although the lack of marks on the ground later off "prove" that all wheels did leave the ground for a while. Survivors have declared that they did noticed they were "on the air". (It's my personal understanding, from the several news sources witnesses etc ESTIMATING the height of the airplane, that it reached somewhere in the vecinity of 10 meters, with 50 meters being the highest estimation I've heard and 7m the smallest).
During the brief ascend, no explosions or fires can be observed. What was obvious is that it took the plane a long time to become airborne (as declared to police by witness pilot of IB 6464 from Guayaquil).
The plane tries to "hold on" the air for hardly a few seconds, to finally deviate to the right and fall down, crawling on the ground with the bottom, outside of the runaway, and it dissapears from the camera angle.
Other videos of witnesses speak of (and show) dust clouds appearing at that time and then, later on, some distance and time away, a fireball.
The judge has forbidden the public exhibition of the recording.
The video is of fairly low quality and small size (resolution), so it's not very effective to the investigation other than to discard visible explosions or large fires or smoke previous to the fall on the ground and to determine that indeed it "took off" quite late in the runaway and with a steep-ish nose angle.
Some sentences that are *suppossed* to be LITERAL from the pilot 876246 log entry on the 20th (day of the accident):
-"Before take off, RAT temperature reaches 99 degrees ..."
-"RAT heater, active while on the ground ..."
-"Airplane dispatched according to MEL ... Action taken by Spanair Madrid"
Last edited by justme69; 13th Sep 2008 at 18:10.