Maggie's Farm

Well, it depends on whether or not we're ruling out "Hand of Fate", "Divine Intervention" and "Kismet meets Destiny". Assuming so, then one guess would be mechanical error, although I don't recall "Hard nose down!" being part of the electronic landing commands. They're usually much more fussy about such things when five seconds from touchdown.

The obvious culprit would be a stall, but I haven't read a hint about it going too slow, unlike Asiana. My best guess at this point, assuming something didn't actually break, is that the flaps or vertical stabilizer trim weren't in the proper position and they thought they had more lift than they did. That is, it stalled, but not at stall speed. It's to note that there are (at least) two episodes in 'Mayday' where an incorrect flap or trim setting was all it took.

Well, it strikes me that a microburst or vortex wouldn't affect just the tip end of the plane like that, but you can bet it's in the running. They ran into a microburst 'wall', so to speak.

As for Asiana, I'll have some updates at the end of next week when I take over the morning links for a few days, although I haven't heard anything on the 'intern'.

I take it you're using Chrome or Opera? Weirdo. But we still love you! Maggie's is open to all walks of life.

Both Firefox and IE now have built-in spell-checkers. This means you now have no more excuses not to join the 21st century. Sorry, I know it's a cold, hard truth for the Chrome or Opera lover to hear, but given how many pixels you wasted with your correction, and given how every additional pixel creates more server use and thus more heat and thus more cooling and thus more energy, it strikes me you'd at least want to use FF or IE to help save the planet.

Unless you want it to die, of course.

The choice is yours.

Actually, what impresses me is that your spell-checker had eventide in it. :)

Yes, I knew that wasn't a good example, but hey, he's an Opera or Chrome guy. What's he know about cows?

I could agree with every bit of that except for the "four seconds" part. These birds are really sluggish at low speeds, so it's hard to believe a mere 'overadjustment' would cause it to react so violently in just four seconds. This incident sure went from "no brainer" to "no answer" quickly.

Interesting link, thanks!

The question isn't what happened to the front gear, but why the plane was nose-down when it should have been flared. If the animation's correct, that's a pretty amazing drop in attitude in a mere four seconds. As I said in the post, I'm not sure an airliner would do that in four quick seconds even if the pilot jammed the stick to the firewall.

The cockpit voice recorder was supposedly going to be analyzed yesterday, so we might see some additional info soon.