Puzzled
I have read most of the posts here since last week, and would like to express my appreciation for contributors who have kept the ratio of information to blather as high as PPRuNe used to be, and far higher than anything in recent memory (which extends back to July 2007).
People seem to think the tail hit first. There is a puzzle with that, which I raised with PJ2 privately.
Pitch angle for a tail strike first (bogies tilted, shock absorber extended) is 16° wings-level and 17.5° with 5° bank, and it doesn't go below 16° again until you are 13° AoB.
And the aircraft is descending. So add, say, 1°? That makes AoA at least 17°. High AoA protection is always active. I don't know what AlphaMax and AlphaProt are for that config or weight (I do have a query out). But how much higher than 17° can AlphaMax possibly be?
PJ2 suggests that you can pitch up to 15° on go-around. Sure, I would think, if the aircraft is ascending, which it usually is before the pitch-up gets to 15°. But this one wasn't, obviously. PJ2 also suggests the tail can hit first if there is say 2m of rising ground. I am not sure about that, since the bogies have gone over that same piece of ground a few fractions of a second before and apparently not left a trace (I note they are outside the line of the tail cone), so that still means the AC had a pitch angle of 16° or above, providing its AoB was 13° or less.
In short, I think there are some figures here that don't yet make sense for what is emerging here as a consensus CFIT scenario. And if it wasn't CFIT, there is nothing yet here to suggest how LOC may have occurred.
PBL