Flew the triple for some 8 years, had many wonderful crosswind landings decrabbing during the flare at close to maximum allowable crosswinds. Always nice smooth touchdowns; in the sim, had the instructors crank up the crosswinds to 55 kts.........no problem! I was beginning to think that the B777 IS REALLY A WONDER ( or was I a true boy wonder?! ) until one hot, humid and gusty day ( a typhoon wasn't far away ) at MNL. A bumpy ride with crosswinds about 28 kts.....well a piece of cake I thought with my previous impeccable record of tackling crosswinds more than that. Down to a flare at 30 feet RA and a cool left rudder pressure and right aileron input to align with the runway. In a split second the wings went wiggy waggy and we crunched onto the runway in a most awkward fashion. It really felt terrible and both of us at the pointy end really thought we had a collapsed gear! A call from the cabin indicated some O2 masks dropped. Drat, we really feared the worse. Never had a lousy landing on the triple before.
Seriously we asked tower if we still had the undercarriage intact; not to worry, all was fine. We wrote in a suspected hard landing in the tech log, the maintenance guys did their hard landing inspection. Nothing amiss. The maintenance control guys pulled out the QAR data......no side loads beyond limits and maximum vertical G was 1.51. What a relief but it really felt like such a lousy landing!
Over the next few times with quite a bit of crosswind I was very cautious and wary but most of the subsequent landings turned out great. Then one lousy afternoon in CJU a similar thing happened but not as bad as the one in MNL. Then I never had any more of such crunchers again. I am no ace but I still cannot figure why. Nobody else could enligthen me since.