I was back on the Thread after 3 days and I was glad to see that I had 3 or 4 pages of posts to read...
I thought that some of the discussions were drifting a little too much toward the "I do, you do" which was taking us nowhere as far as the accident was concerned.
I was admiring 100%Please description of the intricacies of flying the airbus (thanks, excellent post!!)
I was thinking of posting a "Sobering Thought" stating more or less " I am sure that some of the guys and chaps from AAIB, BEA, NTSB etc. with real knowledge will be smiling at our efforts and therefore we should never forget in our postings that ours are mainly guesses, educated guesses most of the time, but still guesses, just to keep all of us focused"
Then I came to
Sitting Bull post.... and the light went off!!
Not for long though.... I put the light back on and started thinking again...
I am thinking that what Sitting Bull has shared with us is a great amount of information: Thanks for sharing that with us.
Now we can go back to the beginning and drop all the speculations on good v/s bad pilots, trained v/s untrained pilots, cultural issues, etc.
Here we are: normal approach, no emergencies, nothing out of the norm, including the decision to go around and to start the GA.... so far so good.
Where I am perplexed is in the last two bullets of Sitting Bull information
-according to the official statement of the Alitalia crew that witnessed the crash, AAW771 descended out of the low clouds nose down, wings level and in one piece
-after violently hitting nose first it disintegrated with the tail separating and tumbling over
I am trying to fit this description with what I saw. Granted, I only saw a little part (and I have already said so) of the area outside the field of debris, therefore I am well aware that I do not have all the facts, nor I pretend to say so.
However, Sitting Bull statement has increased exponentially my questions!
Some examples: Where did the nose first impact occurred? How does a nose first impact tie with the debris field
and the markings present on the ground? (not only from the limited pictures on the ground, but also the videos from above openly available); How did the nose eradicate the electrical poles (if it was the nose)?; How did the electrical wire ended in the tail cone?; How were the cactus cut? And many more....
Also, I do not think that there is a clear line of sight to the beginning of the debris field from holding point Rwy 09, where the Alitalia aircraft was. I think that there are several trees and bushes. Could it be that the AZ pilots saw the second part of the initial impact? Could it be that during the GA the aircraft bottomed, scraping the electrical line with the tail, hitting with the back, bouncing up, nosing down and this is what the Alitalia pilots saw?
I do not know and I do not want to speculate at this point. From my side, I will stop speculating and will wait for the report.
Sitting Bull, thanks again for the access to real information you have granted all of us.
C-SAR