Smiling Ed. These guys not only failed to set the flaps/slats, they then proceeded to pull the plane right up into a stall. Clearly they were thinking about something other than flying the airplane. They just jerked it off the deck and lost the bet that it would fly like that
I am reading so much bull**** on this forum about this accident that I cannot belive this is a "profesional pilots forum".
If we have learned something on this bussines is not to draw fast and easy conclusions.
Many wrong things happened that fatal day and we still do not know why.
The thing we do know for sure is that a lot of people died including the good professionals that were doing that flight.
I am reading here that pilots failed to check that the flaps and slats were lowered. Can somebody tell me how do you do that from the cockpit of an MD-82? So you move the lever of the flaps to the selected take off possition and the indicator shows you that. So what? unbuckle and walk to the passenger cabin to take a look through the window to check if they are deployed?
So far at least 2 things seem to have gone wrong on this tragedy.
The flaps and slats were not deployed despite "THE CREW READ THE CHECKLIST ITEM AND MOVED THE FLAP LEVER TO THE SELECTED TAKE OFF POSSITION" This information comes from the CVR and FDR and it is on the preliminary accident report.
So at first glance seems that they did their job. Reading and following the checklist.
However the flaps were not down and this as far as I know is a different system that the the TOWS.
Second issue was that once they selected take off thrust the "flaps/slats audio warning" should have sounded on cockpit and would have surely forced and aborted take off maneuver.
I have the priviledge of being a friend of the Captain of that flight and for me and for all the people that knew him he was a real professional besides being a great person.
The fact that on the first take off attempt after the long taxi from the terminal to the runway he detected the RAT probe temperature and decided to turn around should tell everybody that the crew was a professional one doing its job properly.
Some others maybe would just have took off with such RAT issue but not him.
They did their checklits throughly, detected the malfuntion of the overtemperature on the RAT and wisely retourned to the terminal in another long taxi. Careless crews do not do this.
Now comes the thing. We pilots follow specific protocols and procedures. We detect a malfuction, we report it to maintenance.
Maintenance investigate it and fix it or declare it "airworthy" according to MEL, Manual and company precedures.
So maintenace tell you the airplane is OK, they sign the books and declare it airworthy. So you get no more Warnings on cockpit and all appear to be functional.
What do you do?
When this tragedy happened many people claimed seein exploding one engine, they even ventured it was the left one.
Now we are far away from that theory and we know more data.
But what we know for sure is that this accident happened not by a single error o malfunction. At least two different systems failed.
Flaps didn't lowered despite the lever being activated and the TOWS didn't worked either.
I am sure there were several other contributing factors that we do not know yet but that the combination of them made this accident happen.
When we have all the answers, it will be the time to determine who was responsible or not.
One things is speculate about possible technical scenarios that could have happened and another thing is blaming a dead person of being a careless jockey that endangered the live of hundreds.
