An interesting article published yesterday:
Safety slip in Madrid crash also seen in U.S. - USATODAY.com
It talks of 55 voluntarily reported cases of bad takeoff configurations in the past 7 years or so in the USA alone. That's a lot more than I had found, that were around a dozen or so cases, but once I found it was pretty common, I didn't continue looking that closely. Most of them, of course, were catched in-extremis by the Take Off Configuration Warning Systems.
The Spanair pilots were of the few unlucky ones (together with Lanzarote and Reagan's cases, i.e.) that had an unnoticed TOWS failure shortly before they needed it the most. After so many years and so many million flights, I guess it was due to happen.
It comes to point to that, even with sufficient training, experience, safety culture, management, maintenance, etc, human error is still a piece of the puzzle that just can not be avoided and therefore needs as much help as possible from technology, etc.
But I don't think I'm saying anything new here. Traffic accidents, even by professional and experienced taxi/bus/truck drivers, happen every single day when humans in charge of vehicles make bad choices against everything they have been trained for. And no, most of them are not "careless" or "suicidal", they are just humans carrying their children to school everyday but don't even bother doing a basic visual check of all four wheels before entering the car. And constanly, driving schools, TV safety campains, police controls, improved vehicle designs, better roads and signage, etc, etc are reminding us to watch our speed, buckle up, not forget to turn on lights at night, etc, etc, etc.
And yet, we all do make those basic mistakes at times, putting our own lifes at risk against our better judgment for "unkown reasons".
BTW, does anybody know if there was ever an investigation report for the Indian Airways accident of Dic 17 1978 of B737 VT-EAL that explained why it tried to take off w/o slats and it crashed?