Unfortunately there is no commentary with the clip.
My guess would be, that it's probably the first landing by one of the NASA pilots, who would have been an experienced test pilot, but may not have had that much delta time, and most likely none on a delta that big....
Originally Posted by keesje
How could the pilot have prevented this bumpy landing?
Basically by applying the same technique as on Concorde, which can be slightly counter-intuitive.
On Concorde you don't "flare" in the conventional sense, you maintain essentially the same pitch attitude to touch-down, and it's the ground effect of that big delta, that produces the "flare" in the sense of reducing the vertical speed to near zero at touch-down.
When entering ground effect there is a definite pitch-down moment which one has to counter with a definite control input to maintain pitch attitude. That's something one has to learn to 'dose' correctly (preferably in the sim, but I don't know if one was still available). In this case there was clearly some overcorrecting going on....
Sorry Rainboe, this was not SOP neither on the Tu-144 nor on Concorde ...
Originally Posted by Jet II
Let the autopilot land it?
These were test flights, which included handling evaluation. You wouldn't have learned much from letting the A/P do the job.
Originally Posted by airfoilmod
His AoA looks minimal for a Delta, so my F-106 bud tells me
Always difficult to judge accurately from a video... also the Tu-144LL had canards, which would have helped to keep the AoA down.
There is a nice NASA report about the handling trials. Don't have a link at hand, but it's NASA/TM-2000-209850, "A Qualitative Piloted Evaluation of the Tupolev Tu-144 Supersonic Transport", authored by people from Langley, Dryden and Boeing.
CJ