ORIGINAL: Tall Paul
The Autoland on the L-1011 crabbed the plane relative to the localizer beam, pointing the nose into the wind.
At 5 feet, the rudder pushes the nose to align with the runway heading (decrab), so there's no large lateral forces on the landing gear.
Tall Paul,
It was definitely around 300 feet on the radio alt when the L1011 autopilot aligned the aircraft centreline with the runway.
pimmnz,
If you have access to a 767 check the Flying Manual for the chart that shows the pitch and roll angles at which the various extremities (wing tip, tail bumper, tailplane tips) scrape the ground. Then figure out how much less angle it could take if the tailplane did not have dihedral. BA had their own Flying Manual, but it was probably a copy of Boeing's.
BTW I was copilot on the last scheduled BA flight from Brisbane to Auckland on March 25 1995. What a shame we pulled out and handed the route over to Quantas.