Yes, that's what I meant. In many operations, maintenance interrogation of the airplane's data can be done quickly and easily (wireless transmission) to confirm the rate of descent.
I think we are on the same page with this, as far as the AMM goes. I disagree however with the requirement in the AMM's hard-landing section (B777) that a hard landing must be reported by the pilot before the airplane is handled as per the AMM. If no report is made then the hard landing didn't occur. These days though the airplane may self-report. I know some A330's that do.
So in view of that, I like your carrier's policy - either declare it if it was a hard landing, or release the airplane to your colleagues who are taking it out next.
The reason I disagree is because today there are entirely objective ways of quickly determining whether a landing was hard and what the roll was at touchdown etc so the metrics in the AMM can be accurately determined and a decision made on the spot.
The B777 vertical 'g' parameter is sampled 10x per second so the specified vertical acceleration in the AMM could easily be determined from the data in support of a pilot's report.
The obvious difficulty arises when, for perfectly reasonable reasons no report is filed especially where there is some doubt, and the airplane's FOQA data later reveals a heavy landing, with roll, etc. In this day of rich data collection I don't see how to square the two.
Several very heavy landings have occurred on Airbus A320/A321 aircraft and the airplane has gone flying again, (discussed elsewhere on PPRuNe). The maintenance people dealing with the pilot report (when made) did not know how to interrogate the ACARS/ACMS for the Load 15 Report for the SSFDR-recorded vertical acceleration parameter. These landings were in excess of 3g's and resulted in gear changes. In at least one case the airplane continued to fly for almost two weeks before being grounded after the FOQA data was read.
Last edited by PJ2; 23rd Mar 2013 at 07:00.