Originally Posted by ChristiaanJ
This "overfilling" and the resulting lack of airspace has been blamed for the 'oil-canning' (hydraulic shockwave) of tank 5, it seems.
Well, it was one of the theories put forward - as has been said many times, the only incontrovertible evidence was completely destroyed by the fire. Could the FE have transferred some of that fuel to tank 5 after pushback?
One of the things I forgot in my last post was the reference to eyewitnesses who stated that they thought they saw flames before F-BTSC hit the part of the runway where the debris lay. While it would be churlish to disregard it completely, experience shows that of all the types of evidence available, eyewitness evidence tends to be the least accurate - and in fact one of the recurring factors is that human beings seem to be bad at remembering at what point in the sequence fire was involved - in many accidents where the craft was intact until it hit the ground, contemporary eyewitnesses have said that the craft caught fire in the air.