The final report on a hard landing of an Airbus A320 faults the pilots, but also points to known deficiences regarding the aircraft. The report highlights something that has been a subject of previous articles I’ve published — how modern automated flight-control systems sometimes confuse pilots and result in unintended hazards.
The A320 has wing surfaces called speed brakes or spoilers that deploy automatically at touchdown to reduce lift and help the airplane’s slow down.
A brand new A320, operated by a unit of Grupo SATA, had a hard landing after the pilots mistakenly did not reduce the thrust to idle, and accordingly the airplane’s flight-control computers didn’t order immediate spoiler deployment. This caused the airplane to become airborne after takeoff and then slam back on the ground.
Apparently Airbus received several reports of A320 hard landings caused by spoilers failing to deploy and it has reprogramed the flight computer to address this problem.