and what about this one
Having gone through it, the report indeed seems really thorough and covers a lot of ground.
Having said that, I was struck by the way the apparent absence of data from the QAR is covered in section 1.3.2. The for me at least somewhat cryptic language used seems in stark contract with the overall clarity of the report. So is imo the apparent ease with which the Spanish investigation board, without further ado, steps over the question marks this QAR issue raises.
Here is the text:
"The QAR was recovered from the aircraft wreckage some days later. The optical magnetic disk where the QAR records information had been installed on the aircraft in early August 2008. The equipment manufacturer, Teledyne, downloaded the information contained on the disk at its facilities only to discover that the data were from another of the operator's airplanes and from previous flights. There was an incompatibility between the recording formats used by the equipment and those used to record to the disk."
What are they trying to communicate exactly here ? Where the data only from another aircraft, including the stored data from the previous flights, or does the "data....from the previous flights" bit refer to the accident aircraft ? And the sentence that "there was an incompatibility between the recording formats used by the equipment (ed. the actual QAR?) and those (ed. recording formats?) used to record to the disk (ed. so of the equipment, i.c. the QAR ?) is utter gobbledegook.
Are they actually saying as much that the QAR retrieved could not have recorded the data on the disk retrieved from the QAR ?
Assuming, of course, that the QAR in question and the disk in question were indeed retrieved from the accident aircraft, it is to me at least not immediately clear, with the disk apparently installed a few weeks before the accident, any malfunction of the QAR/disk would have gone unnoticed before the accident. Doesn't Spanair retrieve the data regularly for a flight analysis programme ?
Perhaps this and the apparent lack of interest on the side of the investigation board has to do with the fact that QAR is not "mandatory equipment".
Perhaps it is nothing, but it made me think a second in an otherwise apparently very serious investigation.