With a little luck they will soon have all of the answers to what went wrong.
With regards to the mention of auto thrust disconect. It would be possible to have been stable with all checks complete from a good approach. Then say the F/O under training, who means to disconect the automatics and hand fly for the landing, mistakenly only disconects the auto thrust so no aural allert.
Up until now the approach has maybe gone very well so the captain is relaxed and for this short while doesn't notice. The aircraft maintains profile on autopilot but with thrust at idle, the speed decays rapidly (still no aural alert) Now at low level the stick shake goes and it's too low to recover. In the heat of the moment it could be confused with a double engine failure, but this would have come with lots of alerts. The auto pilot is now disconected and the thrust levers fire walled. The ground is rushing up and the GPWS alerts have started to come thick and fast. They start to pull up to reduce the decent rate. The engines are now spooling up so they pich the nose up even more. the aircraft hits the ground tail heavy, the rest we know.
Last edited by BALLSOUT; 1st Mar 2009 at 23:10.