‘Flight JK5022’, a Spanish tragedy

A horrific concatenation of errors led to the tragedy of flight JK5022 of the defunct Spanair company, which crashed at the Barajas airport on August 20, 2008, causing 154 deaths and 18 serious injuries. Fifteen years later, the production company Secuoya has made a shocking documentary, Flight JK5022. The Spanair tragedydirected by Alberto Puerta, which offers Movistar Plus+.

Divided into three episodes, in the first two it reconstructs the accident from the recorded audios of the emergency teams, those responsible for the airport, the airplane cabin, etc. It is thus proven that everything that could have gone wrong that fateful day, did go wrong. The plane heading to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria aborted takeoff due to a fault: the excessive temperature of a probe that only needs to be heated in flight.

The maintenance technicians stopped it directly: they deactivated the probe. When the plane was finally dispatched, the pilots forgot to configure it properly for takeoff. The device rose for six seconds before falling to the ground, where it caught fire. Human error was added to that of on-board technology. The TOWS (Take Off Warning System) system that would have alerted the pilots of the configuration error did not work. And finally, the lack of organization in the implementation of emergency teams considerably delayed rescue tasks.

It is not the first time that the JK5022 disaster has been the subject of a film reconstruction. Telecinco premiered the fiction series in 2010 Flight IL8714, totally based on the event, and very explicit in the identification of the culprits. It made it clear that in addition to the pilots’ error, and the poor resolution of the breakdown, the failure of the TOWS system was key, for which Boeing (which had absorbed McDonnell-Douglas, manufacturer of the damaged plane) was not responsible.

The documentary goes further. In it, aviation safety experts, lawyers, technicians and, above all, those affected take the floor who, organized in an association, have been demanding justice for 15 years. Their complaints focus on the report of the Civil Aviation Accident and Incident Investigation Commission (Ciaiac), which detailed the many failures of the pilots, and described the intervention of the maintenance technicians as erroneous, although unrelated to the failure. of the TOWS system, which, surprisingly, he failed to explain.

Those affected believe that the report weakened the criminal case, causing the Madrid Court to shelve it, with serious consequences also in the compensation chapter, an issue that is not addressed in the documentary. The last episode of the series moves away from the main theme to become a harsh plea against the practices of Boeing, which, since 1987, when a plane similar to Spanair’s crashed in Detroit under identical circumstances, was aware of the fragility of the TOWS system. in these devices. He then limited himself to sending a telex to his clients, warning them of the need to check the operation of that system before each takeoff. The warning did not reach Spanair’s manuals.