Originally Posted by
londonclubguy
We had a very nice flight today to faro but had a query. There was a very hard landing with a long pause between rear and front wheels hitting tarmac and the aircraft did not slow for a considerable time and then jolted to a stop. Is this standard for the arrival airfield or could something have been amiss? We were a little jet lagged from our arrival yesterday from the US but it felt unusual to a landing we’d experienced. I thought for a moment or two we were not going to stop and had a problem.
Excellent crew and food on board although the product itself remains poor.
In a nutshell...
The firmness or otherwise of the touchdown isn't an indicator of quality of the landing. That said overly 'hard' landings can and do occur with reasonable regularity and require maintenance inspections and occasionally they cause some damage. It's quite tricky as a passenger to tell where on the scale of firm to damagingly hard the landing is because you'd have to sit in the same seat, on the same model of aircraft, over and over again to train your bottom. (no really).
Stopping wise modern aircraft 'carbon' brakes work better with a single application. At many busy airports there is need to minimise the time spent on the runway. So if you land and brake then have a long way to trundle slowly to the exit you spend too long on the runway. What tends to happen is the aircraft lands, rolls to near the exit it has chosen and then a single firm brake application is used. In the original software build of the A380s fully automatic braking system (called "brake to vacate") if you told the computer to use the last exit from the runway you would swear you were going to run off the end really very quickly before the computer applied the brakes very hard indeed. It was so disconcerting that they had to mod the software a bit though that costs a little more in both runway occupancy and in brake wear.