Originally Posted by
ZeBedie
I seem to remember Air Europe doing something similar at Funchal? I think it was said that the step down into the flight deck was changed to a step up!
It seems that while the 757 is very easy to de-rotate too quickly, giving a hard nose gear landing, it's not built to take those impacts. My recollection is that if you don't fly the nose gear onto the runway before the autobrake bites, you'll run out of elevator authority and can't prevent the nose slamming in?
Well I’ve only got 4000 hrs on them and you’re talking a fair bit of bollocks there. It’s certainly no harder to de rotate than any other Boeing and certainly easier than certain airbus products. The Air Europe incident was a nose wheel first job in to a notoriously difficult field plagued by wind shear with different winds very often at both ends, where even the local carrier ( presumably fairly exposed to the place ) have pranged a few.
Carrying speed well in excess of Vref greatly enhances the chance of a nose wheel first or shallow touchdown and this looks a classic case of that. As someone said perhaps wait for the actual accident report.