Courts in Spain are finally allowing a trial to move forward next month on Spanair flight JK5022 which crashed on takeoff, killing 154 passengers, with a miraculous handful of survivors. After 15 years of stalling and stonewalling by Boeing...
The saga of Spanair flight JK5022 continues
On the 20th of August 2008, a Spanish airliner taking off from Madrid stalled and crashed just moments after liftoff, careening off the runway and exploding in flames as hundreds looked on in horror. By the time firefighters reached the crash site beside runway 36L, the plane lay ruined and burning, surrounded by the charred remains of 154 passengers and crew, who just moments earlier had been bound for the sunny beaches of the Canary Islands. Amid the wreckage, rescuers managed to find just 18 survivors, all badly injured, who had been spared by the flames.
At first, no one could say why Spanair flight 5022 was unable to climb, but the truth was soon revealed in the wreckage itself. Somehow, the pilots had sent their plane hurtling down the runway without extending the flaps and slats for takeoff, then failed to detect their error in time to avoid a catastrophic crash. It was the same mistake which had caused tragedy after tragedy, from America to Indonesia, and now it had happened again in the heart of Spain’s capital city. And just as in accidents past, a crucial alarm that should have warned of the danger failed to sound. How could it have happened again? Had the lessons of the past gone unheeded? A comprehensive investigation would eventually reveal how regulatory failures prevented the detection of the faulty warning, and how a series of delays, interruptions, and stressors when mixed with poor procedural design, led a normally competent crew to attempt a takeoff without performing one of the most basic steps to prepare their aeroplane for flight. Moreover, and even worse, was the fact that Boeing had a fix for this situation that would have prevented the aeroplane from taking off in the first place but had decided not to install it, or advise owners of the aeroplanes to have it installed as an easy and inexpensive retrofit.
In analyzing the basic sequence of events that led to the crash, the federal investigative agency, the CIAIAC, noted pilot error due to a combination of psychological stress from pressure to take off in a timely manner and a poorly implemented checklist system. And the international press predominantly ran with this simple narrative of “pilot error”. But was that the end of the story…. hardly.