[5][6] 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.

[7][failed verification] 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.

[11] The aircraft was permitted to fly with an inoperable RAT probe heater because icing was not expected during the flight.

[12][8] The accident occurred during the second attempt, at 14:24 local time,[8]: 6 [13] due to the pilot's failure to deploy the flaps and slats as required for takeoff.

The landing gear and the engines detached from the aircraft and the plane continued sliding on the ground then colliding with another small embankment.

In this impact the tail was torn off, the cockpit collapsed into the passenger area and the fuel leaked and ignited into a fireball.

The aircraft was engulfed in flames and continued sliding on the ground until it reached De la Vega stream and collided with the riverbank.

[19] A 30-year-old woman with British and Spanish dual citizenship survived with a punctured lung and broken left arm but no burns, as she was thrown from row 6, still attached to her seat, into the stream.

[21] Information extracted from the flight data recorder showed that the aircraft had taken off with flaps at 0°, and that the alarm for that abnormal takeoff configuration had not sounded.

The cockpit recordings revealed that the pilots omitted the "set and check the flap/slat lever and lights" item in the After Start checklist.

In the Takeoff Imminent verification checklist the copilot had simply repeated the correct flap and slat position values without actually checking them, as shown by the physical evidence.

[30] Spanair stated that the problem detected on the first takeoff attempt was overheating caused by a temperature gauge's de-icing system, rather than a malfunction of the temperature gauge itself, and that since icing was not a risk on that flight, the de-icing system had been deactivated by the mechanic with the captain's approval.

The recording showed that both pilots were concerned about a repair job performed earlier on the day of the crash, in which mechanics used an ice pack to cool an overheating temperature sensor and removed a fuse.

[37] Secondly, examination of the aircraft's maintenance logs showed that the thrust reverser on the right-side engine had been deactivated pending repair.

They theorised that a fault in this relay could explain both the overheating of the probe and why the flaps and slats alarm had not sounded.

[8]: 192–198 [42][43] James W. Hudspeth, an investigator of a previous near accident (an MD-83, starting from Lanzarote) that was superficially similar, pointed out that the fuse of the so-called "left ground control relay" at position K-33 of the control panel might have been the actual culprit in the erroneous flight mode: Hudspeth found out during a 2-week investigation at Lanzarote that it is customary in normal maintenance routine to temporarily remove this circuit-breaker to engage flight mode, but the circuit-breaker is afterwards sometimes not replaced correctly.

[8]: 95–200 [44] Spanish daily El País reported that, as revealed in an internal report issued by Spanair, malware which had infected the airline's central computer system used to monitor technical problems with its aircraft may have resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the aircraft.