Spanair Flight 5022
2008 aviation accident in Spain
Spanair Flight 5022 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Barcelona–El Prat Airport to Gran Canaria Airport, Spain, with a stopover in Madrid–Barajas Airport that crashed just after take-off from runway 36L at Madrid-Barajas Airport at 14:24 CEST (12:24 UTC) on 20 August 2008. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, registration EC-HFP. Of the 172 passengers and crew on board, 154 died and 18 survived.
It was the first fatal accident for Spanair, and the worst crash to occur in Spain in 25 years. The accident further worsened Spanair's negative image at the time and exacerbated its financial difficulties. Spanair ceased operations on 27 January 2012.
Flight and aircraft
The aircraft, named Sunbreeze (registration EC-HFP; constructor's number 53148), had been manufactured in late 1993 and was acquired by Spanair in July 1999 from Korean Air.
There were 166 passengers and six crew members on board, including the 39-year-old captain, Antonio Garcia Luna, and the 31-year-old first officer, Francisco Javier Mulet.
Prior to the accident
Fifty-nine minutes before the flight's second attempted take-off, the pilots had abandoned a departure because of excessive temperatures in the ram air turbine (RAT) probe. The aircraft was taken to a parking area where maintenance workers de-activated the RAT probe's heater. The aircraft was permitted to fly with an inoperable RAT probe heater because icing was not expected during the flight.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q152758. Authority coordinates are 40.530, -3.570. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2012, 1993 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spanair Flight 5022” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.