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experts comment on the crash of flight JK5022 at Madrid’s Barajas airport

Over 100 people died in the crash, which occurred as the plane took off. It was thought to have been caused by an engine fire.

Dr. Guy Gratton CEng, Lecturer in Aeronautics at Brunel University, said:

“There should be no mechanism where an engine fire on its own is likely to cause a fire of this magnitude.

“In principle, a single engine failure shouldn’t cause the aircraft to crash; however, the conditions in the area will certainly have been hot, which degrades both aircraft performance and engine power, so may have reduced the aeroplane’s ability to climb. This may have caused the ground impact and subsequent fire.

“The loss of life implies a very high rate of descent when the aircraft hit the ground – ideally this should have been *fairly* survivable – airliner structures are designed to be “crashworthy” – as illustrated by the recent Heathrow accident where a rather severe landing which did very substantial aircraft damage, caused no significant injuries. For this level of loss of life however, the aircraft was presumably not under the level of control that an engine fire alone would probably cause.”

Prof Ian Poll, Head of the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield University, said:

“If it is correct that the aircraft was ‘taking off and skidded off the runway’, then this sounds like an aborted takeoff. This could be due to a number of things including engine failure. However, it is a well practised event (in simulation) and aircrew are trained to respond to emergencies in the correct way.

“The rules of operation are such that a pilot must be able to abort a take-off whilst the aircraft is still on the ground and have enough runway left to come to a stop using maximum brakes. Maximum braking could be severe enough for brakes to catch fire and tyres to burst.

“However, the aircraft and its brakes are designed to cope with this situation. The brakes are antilock and antiskid and the aircraft should travel in a straight line even under maximum braking.

“So what else might have happened? The weather looks good i.e. good visibility and a dry runway so there appear to be no particular issues there.

“Therefore, at this stage, it appears to me that the main questions are these:
– Was it an aborted take-off?
– If so why was the take-off aborted?
– Why did the aircraft skid and skid off the runway?
– What caused the fire?
– Did the aircraft break up?”

Prof Bill Banks, President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and an aviation engineering expert, said:

“This is a tragic accident which has resulted in the loss of life. Flying, does however, remain one of the safest forms of public transport – and we can see that just by the sheer number of passenger flights that take place each day compared to the much, much lower number of accidents. There is an important task now to find out what could have caused the problem and the investigation should not rule out human error as well as any engineering fault. In engineering it can be deduced pretty quickly where the fault or problem stemmed from and rectified. We must wait now for the investigators to do their job to determine if indeed, it was a human or engineering failure that caused this crash.”

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