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A technical report for people with an aviation background but still an interesting read to follow. Here’s a break-down of what happened according to the Lebanese Civil Aviation Authority’s (LEBCAA) preliminary report:

  1. The aircraft had received departure clearance from runway 21 via the LATEB 1D standard instrument departure route.
  2. Immediately prior to takeoff the clearance was changed to “immediate right turn direct Chekka”.
  3. After takeoff tower instructed the aircraft to turn onto a heading of 315 degrees and change to control frequency. The crew acknowledged and continued the right hand turn. Although heading 315 was selected on the master control panel, the airplane continued until a heading of 003 degrees, a series of 10 bank angle warnings began while the airplane turned right.
  4. Control had instructed the flight turn left to heading 270 degrees. The crew acknowledged the instruction, the aircraft initiated that left turn, 270 was selected on the master control panel, but the aircraft did not maintain the assigned heading.
  5. The aircraft turned onto a southerly heading, almost immediately followed by a first stick shaker activation that lasted for 29 seconds, about 13 seconds after the stick shaker activation the airplane reached its maximum angle of attack of +32 degrees.
  6. Another stick shaker activation followed 55 seconds after the first activation, this time the stick shaker operated for 26 seconds. During these 26 seconds the aircraft made two sharp left turns reaching a maximum left bank angle of 118 degrees and a nose down attitude of 63.1 degrees during the second left turn.
  7. 3 seconds after the stick shaker ceased the overspeed clacker activated and continued until impact at approx. N33.743 E35.410 about 15 seconds later.

As for the blackboxes:

The flight data recorder was recovered on Feb 7th 2010, all data could be extracted by the French BEA.

The cockpit voice recorder was recovered from the sea on Feb 10th 2010 however the memory part was missing. The memory was recovered on Feb 16th 2010, however one of the 16 memory chips was found cracked resulting in about 10 seconds of recordings missing every 4 minutes. The chip is likely to be unreadable, however additional attempts to restore the chip’s contents are underway.

The final report is due on May 15.

From Aviation Herald: Flight track (Graphics: LEBCAA/BEA)