Originally Posted by
peekay4
Not necessarily.
In this case I don't know what has been sealed, but often a long timeframe relates to privacy laws, e.g., raw CVR recordings, health / toxicology records of the crew, etc.
From what I've seen, everything alleged to have been "covered up" (e.g., crew actions) were actually covered in detail in the official Portuguese (and English translated) accident report.
The sealed documents primarily concern the internal dealings and archives of the "Raad voor de Luchtvaart" regarding the crash, or rather the predecessor of the current Dutch TSB. These documents might explain the discrepancies between the Dutch and the Portuguese report. A possible reason why these documents might be sealed, is that at the time of the crash the aircraft in question was owned by the RNLAF and leased to Martinair before its planned conversion to a KDC-10 tanker transport.
There was a TV interview with a ground engineer who was apparently pressured into requesting a third reprieve for a scheduled landing gear exchange (which was approved by the RLD) and a lot of people are now looking into whether this could be the reason so many people lost their lives, but when you look at the FDR data it is clear that this was another typical DC10/MD11 rollover. Touchdown of >2.0G with a slight angle of bank, which causes the rear spar of the low wing to shear as the MLG is apparently bolted directly to the wing box. Because the aircraft is still travelling at high forward speed, the wing on this side is just folded over by its own lift while releasing the contents of the onside main fuel tank, and the rest of the aircraft is then rolled upside down by lift generated the other wing. A critical and unforgivable design flaw in this type, imho.
Whether this hard landing was caused by windshear/microburst or mishandling by the crew is up for debate, but I can't help noticing this is all coming out just months after the last passenger MD11 has left the KLM fleet (Martinair still has a few freighters).