On 9 May 2015, an Airbus A400M Atlas cargo plane on a test flight crashed at La Rinconada, Spain, less than 5 kilometers from Seville Airport at around 1:00 pm local time, killing 4 of the 6 crew onboard.
The pilots had reported that the plane had a technical fault and asked permission to land, but hit an electricity pylon while attempting an emergency landing.
The six aircraft crew were Spanish employees of Airbus Defence and Space. Four of them were killed and the remaining two were seriously injured. Three local men helped the two survivors, a mechanic and an engineer, escape from the wreckage
The horrific previously unreleased Euro Press video in this post shows the Airbus A400M Airlifter crashing near Seville during a test flight on May 9, 2015.
According to Reuters, Spanish investigators have found that Airbus and European safety authorities were warned in late 2014 of a software vulnerability in the A400M military plane that was similar to a weakness that contributed to a fatal crash seven months later.
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Data needed to run the engines had been accidentally erased when Airbus workers installed software on the ground, and pilots had no warning there was a problem until the engines failed.
A confidential report by Spanish military investigators into the crash, completed in summer 2017, found that the engine-makers had warned Airbus and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in October 2014 that software installation errors could lead to a loss of engine data, and that technicians may not receive any warning before take-off that a problem had occurred.
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The Spanish government confirmed on 10 May 2015 that the plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had been recovered. Several reports suggested that as many as three of the aircraft’s four engines failed during the A400M’s departure from Seville.
On 3 June 2015 Airbus announced that investigators had confirmed “that engines one, two and three experienced power frozen after lift-off and did not respond to the crew’s attempts to control the power setting in the normal way.
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The Airbus A400M Atlas is a European, four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft.
