2015 Seville Airbus A400M crash

Investigation

The Spanish government confirmed on 10 May 2015 that the plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had been recovered. Despite being examined by a joint team from the Spanish ministries of development and defence, the Spanish authorities subsequently passed the recorders to the French military air accident investigation agency BEAD to extract and analyze the data. On 13 May 2015 it emerged that technical issues were slowing retrieval of the crash data; General Bruno Caïtucoli, head of BEAD, reported that "there are technical issues in reading the system, and it is a question of compatibility between systems, so we are still trying to extract data. The extracting system we are using belongs to the French defence procurement agency DGA," Caïtucoli said, noting that the problem appeared to be a compatibility issue between the recorders and the DGA's data reading system, rather than an issue with the condition of the recorders themselves.

Several reports suggested that as many as three of the aircraft's four engines failed during the A400M's departure from Seville. Airbus initially focused on whether the crash was caused by new management software for the engine-fuel supply, designed to trim the fuel tanks to permit the aircraft to fly certain military manoeuvres. There appeared to have been a trimming issue, leading to strong banking that was not recoverable and that the fuel supply was re-established, but not quickly enough for recovery to safe flight.

Airbus Chief Strategy Officer Marwan Lahoud confirmed on 29 May that incorrectly installed engine control software caused the fatal crash. "The black boxes attest to that there are no structural defects [with the aircraft], but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly." Two days earlier, Airbus CEO Tom Enders criticized Spanish agencies for withholding the flight recorder data. "We would like to see the data and compare it with our hypothesis and proceed quickly to understand the causes of accident, so our aircraft can get back into the air," he told shareholders at the company's annual general meeting in Amsterdam on 27 May.

Senior Airbus executive, Fabrice Bregier, said on 30 May 2015 that there was "either a weakness in the test procedure of planes before they fly, or a problem that results from the implementation of these procedures." 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. Preliminary analyses have shown that all other aircraft systems performed normally and did not identify any other abnormalities throughout the flight." The key scenario being examined by investigators is that the torque calibration parameter data was accidentally wiped on three engines as the engine software was being installed at Airbus facilities, which would prevent the FADECs from operating. Under the A400M's design, the first warning pilots would receive of the engine data problem would be when the plane was 120 m in the air; on the ground, there is no cockpit alert.