Re-Killer Checks;
I was directed to this video by someone on another quite unrelated forum and it would appear that despite comments made elsewhere in this thread about a flap / slat check being a required item on three of the departure check lists it is not necessarily complied with.
Here is one example…At least the very last minute Killer check worked or maybe it was advancing the throttles to get him around the corner onto the runway kicked off the TOWS?
Aviation Video: McDonnell Douglas MD-83 - Spanair
One thing I cannot get my head around however; reading the report of the MD-82 Detroit accident. As I understand it V1, Vr and V2 are calculated for a given set of conditions associated with weight, temperature, and wing condition ie recommended flaps and slats settings. In the case of the Detroit accident a clean wing would have given a stall speed of 170KIAS and I assume that the Spanair aircraft would have had a roughly similar calculated stall speed given the same loading.
According to the NTSB Accident Report, extending the slats to their normal take off setting would have reduced the stall speed to around 130KIAS and the flap extension would have reduced it to around 122KIAS. Now assuming VR=1.25xVs we get 152kts.
The Spanair aircraft rotated at 154KIAS ie., the nose wheel was lifted at 154
but this was still well below the likely actual stall speed of around 170KIAS because the aircraft was clean wing; the stick shaker operated 4 seconds after the nose wheel was lifted and the stall warning sounded, so in short the aircraft was effectively stalled from the moment it left the ground until it fell out of the sky some 15 seconds later.
Firewalling the throttles and selecting flaps and slats at this time would have done no good at all, since with the best will in the world the crews reaction times coupled with the responding actions and deployment of the systems would have been too late.
If I am talking a load of rowlocks here someone please put me right.(But gently please!)
I am a retired Avionics Engineer with a lifetime of experience behind me but I have never been faced with the kind of pressure that the mechanics were faced with. The last fifteen years of my life were spent with the worlds largest operator of the Dassault Falcon 20 and whilst many will say that there is a world of a difference in the systems employed in this aircraft, I would disagree; for a small biz jet it is actually a mini airliner and has exactly the same dual redundancy systems fitted as many a 737 or MD-80 series aircraft and the operating procedures are the same.
But I never had Flight Ops breathing down my neck to get an unserviceable aircraft full of hot and sweaty Spanish passengers fixed. I never had to suffer the chief pilots wrath because one of our aircraft was five minutes late on task. I worked with many ex-airline staff who had however and it comes as no surprise that things get overlooked in the haste to get the aircraft back in service.
The economic problems being faced by Spanair must have played a large part in the outcome; The co-pilot who handled the second engine start was under redundancy notice and the threat of redundancy was very heavy all round. I have worked under these conditions; its not nice and mistakes do get made as a result of trying not to make a mistake.
I personally would have had second thoughts about WHY the RAT probe was working on the ground, but that is something I can say now with the benefit of hindsight and when I’m away from it all. The action taken by the Spanair mechanics to fix the reported problem was right but right for the wrong reason! Pulling the C/B achieved nothing but to isolate a serviceable probe and protect the associated wiring.
Another question evolves from the accident concerning the TOWS. Why didn’t the crew pick up on the fact that when they taxied out for the second time, presumably clean wing, the TOWS alarm didn’t sound when they opened the throttles?
I have been wracking my brain to see if there could be any other reason for the non deployment of flaps/slats on this aircraft. One report here in Spain states that this aircraft had two instances of flap/slat defects in the ten days leading up to the accident.
I am not privy to the nature of the defects, but the engineer in charge at Spanair Barajas has been questioned about them and the authorities it seems are none to happy with the answers.
The very sad thing is that someone could go to jail for this and it looks like it could be the engineers. In this litigious society we have to have someone to blame, someone to jail, someone to sue. This is so wrong. No-one wanted these poor people to die, no-one profited from their deaths; there was no crime. It was an accident; an accident not caused by a single episode but a whole series of events, which as is so often the case in our business had the inevitable result.