Trying to make sense of this tragedy... Hoping to learn from others mistakes/misfurtunes to hopefully prevent becoming a statistic myself... Apologies in advance for the long thread but this issue has me a bit worked up...
List of NTSB documents:
CD List Of Contents
First off, it's maddening and unacceptable that the maintenance records are so poor that no one can say for sure what the aircraft actually weighed... two weight and balance forms dated 04 Jan 08 that are incomplete and don't match!? Logbook entries for hoist and fire king water tank installation stating that W&B was updated with no subsequent weight and balance changes made... It seems plausible that the aircraft was 1000lb heavier than the records furnished to the Pilot for performance calcs... that is absolutely unacceptable... criminal in my mind.
FCU (fuel control unit) chain of control wasn't handled very well it seems... If that was a possible culprit I'd sure bloody like to know about it, being I have two of those overhead keeping me aloft. I'm having a bit of a problem adopting the fcu failure scenario because of the lack of cockpit indicators. The audio analysis indicates the engines went to topping on all heavy passenger carrying fllghts (as the flat 101 on the Ng shows). This makes me believe that the aircraft was at its performance limit (which supports the "heavier than RFM indicated" theory). If the fcu was failing as Carson suggests (stator vane failing to open which allows full ng without achieving rated power output) I would assume to see unusually high T5 (tot) temperatures... a similiar situation to having an ng input sense failure. The copilot was doing a good job of monitoring and calling out flight parameters (as the cvr transcripts show) so I would expect to hear a call out for high temps if that was the case...