Ice chips. No doubt about it!
Ah, if BA ain't doing sump checks after fuelling at Shanghai maybe they orta... the fuel there is half water on good days... the icing lights are always coming on. Yes yes yes I know, the truck sample... I like the Chinese.
That 108 knots... um, if we had been hand flying, maybe the old girl would have just sort of naturally wandered on down at Vref or so, then a short transition in ground effect, we would have maybe gone another dozen metres.
I can well see that detail, the speed decay, being overlooked in the mental rushing about caused by the unexpected, inexplicable, sinister and potentially lethal turn of events. It is just that if it had all started say 500 feet higher then with that sort of speed bleed-off we might have had a really high sink rate going by the time we hit the ground.
I mention that only because it is the fashion these days to use the pilot regardless... the chief pilots / fleet managers etc all like it / recommend it / insist on it because they can't trust people to do things they mostly can't do themselves, namely hand-fly an approach on a sunny afternoon. So let's go back to hand flying when hand flying is an option, and keep our motor skills up, and certain piloting-related sub-systems at the back of our brains in the piloting loop.
Just a thought.