Flying in Brazil can be dangerous to your health

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by TteFAboB

Pay attention to the 11-12 second or to the 30-31 second. There's a flash of light coming out of the left engine. Is it some sort of optical illusion or could it be fire from the excessive fuel suddenly being dumped in the engine? That would change everything. That's a pretty late point to ram the throttle forward.

Having a close look at the footage from that camera, I think Chock and TteFAboB are right, that's a flash of fire, presumably from the engine, which would indicate some sort of extreme throttle movement.
Perhaps the throttle was on forward to try and regain takeoff speed, but when it was clear that they were going to run out of runway first, perhaps he rammed the throttle into reverse to try and decrease the impact speed, which perhaps meant the port engine got into reverse first (perhaps creating the flames) and swung the plane to port.

Here's some stills:

Still 1:


Still 2:


You can just about make out the glare of the light on the wet runway creating that downward spike. It's a pretty large flame, if that is what it is.

[TteFAboB]

I have to correct myself. I said the plane had landed before the 1,000ft mark but there are indeed reports of it landing past it. More than that, a magazine interviewed the pilot from the plane that had landed just before and he said that the ILS had been shut down because of malfunction. So the pilot may have overshot the mark indeed due to coming in too high.

Also, I mentioned a plane that had decided to go around because he also approached poorly and thought the runway to be too wet. He did go around but to land in the auxiliary runway which has the grooving.

The problem with the reverser was an oil leak in the hydraulic system that moves the thing back and forth. The plane's manual tells to lock the thing in the closed position when such a thing happens, which was done, and do maintenance in 10 days (besides from not landing in soaked slicky runways). A source from the government claims that landing without the two reversers prevents water from being pushed away from the landing gears by the air from the engines, making braking harder. Others say that's irrelevant and the plane should've been able to come to a halt had the main runway been grooved like the auxiliary runway.

The black boxes survived, at least apparently, and the analysis should begin soon enough.

[Linton]

[Enigma]

The A320 cant go from reverse thrust to "go around power" in that distance and time. It just aint possible.

[Skybird]

Brazilian state attorney will close down the airport - forever, main TV news just reported.