Originally Posted by
Brian W May
Aircrew manual warned against pushing the stick forward on a bounced landing - this is what the skipper did, all that did (with full flap) was stick the the spoilers further up (DLC) and much of the lift was dumped. The impact was horrendous.
I looked at that aircraft a few days later and, standing on the MLG tyre managed to put my whole arm in the cracked spar - hence the loss of so much fuel.
The aircraft was not set up correctly for autoland so flew straight into the ground as FLARE certainly wasn't armed as they'd done just about everything wrong.
Lord protect us from senior officers flying (standing by for incoming). Skipper was court-marshalled but the rest of the operating crew sat there and watched it happen - in my book, they were culpable too.
On Caledonian we autolanded Tristar and it was dead accurate, time after time.
Part of the problem, from what I recall, was a lack of knowledge, or understanding of some of the subtleties of the AFCS. The ex BA jets had an analogue display for the FCU, whereas the ex PanAm jets, of which 705 was one, had a digital FCU. The crews were trained by BA and did their training using BA sims with the analogue system. In this version of the autopilot, when AL was selected, it had two active AFCS modes, LOC and GS, the FLARE, LAND and ROLLOUT modes were only armed. All this was shown on the Modes panel. In the Digital version, when AL was selected the difference was that the last three noes, FLARE LAND and ROLLOUT only armed below 1500’ radio and after 30 seconds on the GS. The attempted auto land was carried out from a circuit and so the required conditions for an auto land were never achieved. The aircraft did exactly what it was asked to do and flew down the autoapprocah till it hit the runway at c700fpm. This, as mentioned was bad but the bounce and subsequent mishandling causing the second and more significant impact were caused by a check forward of the control column and no increase in power to cushion the landing, probably as a result of the autothrust still being engaged and in an approach alpha mode, again doing as asked.
NB, all from dim distant memory.