Gretch,
Nope, no nerves to touch. I cannot understand why you are wittering on about autothrust when it had nothing to do with the incident. I have no interest in the Bus / Boeing debate but I do have an interest in this particular incident.
If we go Bus/ Boeing lets follow the logic. Why not blame the table too. Because they can actually dine properly, Airbus pilots are better fed and therefore fatter. So maybe the jet had more inertia than a Boeing would have had and the pilot failed to take it into account and flared too little. On a 14hr flight, every bus pilot will tell you that the table is the best invention ever to come into aviation, right up there with the microwave and toaster.
Alternatively a good guy could just have made a mistake in quite challenging conditions flying into a relatively short field for the 330. Maybe he was trying to land it in the right place to avoid a float with heavy braking and flared a tad late. Maybe there was a bit of windshear across the hangars or maybe he was new to the jet or the seat.
After all, if there was such an extreme loss of energy at low altitude, maybe the fix isn't to rescue a now unstable approach, it is to go around. If he'd known about it before hand, he could have changed the flap setting, added some knots or maybe even gone manual thrust if the autothrust couldn't cope.
But, you are right, none of those factors could possibly have affected a Boeing pilot. New pilots instantly slip into the seat and make faultless landings in the most extreme conditions just because the throttles move!
Ghost
Last edited by Ghostflyer; 29th Feb 2008 at 07:59.