Billzilla

I'm perplexed as to what your nosewheel has to do with the autopilot?

It actually doesn't bother them too much, it just scrubs the tyres a bit more. The landing gear is very strong on most of them. FWIW a 747 doing an autoland does not take the crab angle off for touchdown and they are rated at 22 kts of crosswind. Just plant it on the runway and let inertia straighten it all up.

I've never actually flown one, but I've got all the 737's on my Aussie licence. 737-100 up to 737-900.

I actually like crosswind landings, they make it more interesting. So here comes the predictable story ..... Had to take a Metro 2 into Cooly for most of the week with a full 30 kts blowing across the main runway. The problem was the demonstrated max for them is only 20 kts so it was a bit of a handful. The technique was the make the approach normally but with a little more airspeed, then do the usual boot-full of rudder and drop the upwind wing. The problem with that was even with full rudder the aeroplane still wasn't straight with the centreline so I had to take one hand off the controls (it's pretty normal to land a Metro in rough conditions with both hands on the controls as they're quite heavy, and just plant it with approach power on) and cut the power on the downwind engine, and that would yaw the aeroplane enough to get it straight. Next problem was even though the Metro 2 has very stubby wings, the upwind one was down so far I was worried it'd scrape the runway before the main wheel touched down. But fortunately it never did and I was able to just plant the heap of Metro onto the runway, keep full rudder on and then use lots of asymmetric thrust to keep it on the centreline. All good fun.

Indeedy they are. I don't know if it's still true, but for a long time the saying was that Boeing had made more 737's than Airbus had made Airbuses.

Oh that's interesting, Boeing got the MTOW weights wrong on the 747-200 and 300. They show the MTOW as 833,000 lbs but got the kilograms incorrect at 374,850 kg. It's actually 377.8 tonnes.

Edit - I had a look on the Boeing site and found the same numbers on the Wikipedia site. On Wikipedia there's some brief information and it shows the difference though - 747-400 - 216,840 L 747-400ER - 241,140 L 747-400F - 216,840 L http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400#Specifications And http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/747family/pf/pf_400er_prod.page http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/747family/pf/pf_400f_prod.page

Just from watching the 747 crash thread carefully in Pprune and talking to various 747-400 drivers over the years. All of them have said the freighters don't have tail tanks. I'm not rated on the -400 but I've got about 5,000 hours on the -100,-200, and -300's

The purpose-built freighters don't have the tail tank and the converted ones leave the tank in place but deactivated.

Some of the -400 passenger ones do, none of the -400 freighters do though. Nor the converted ones.

Not really sure what you mean with most of that, but an aircraft with a CoG that far back would have no longitudinal dynamic stability and would never be able to achieve stable flight, no matter what control inputs were made. As usual, it's best until we can read the official report so we have an idea as to what went on. Until then speculation probably won't help.

They would have been pushing the controls through the clocks with all their strength. The Alpha Floor warning would have been blaring away for sure though.

Not much of that is true sorry. On the -400's the pilots enter in the weights of the fuel and ZFW (Zero Fuel Weight) into the FMS (Flight Management System, by Honeywell) and from that combined weight and airport location to work out the various V-speeds that are then confirmed manually out of the books by the other pilot. The only automatics used to takeoff on the 747's is the autothrottle and that just goes for either a target EPR (Engine Pressure ratio) or %N1 (fan speed, in the case of GE engines) The reason it 'righted itself' was still due to a very rearwards Cog, I suspect. Best wait until the official reports come out anyway.

747's are pretty insensitive to a few tonnes here or there but 12 tonnes would be very difficult to combat if it moved down towards the tail. They were dead just after they left the ground. :(

I'm not going to be there - too far away - but I've been doing TIG welding for a couple of years now and it's a very good thing to learn.