Yep, a test flight. It's one of the main reasons everyone does "parametric" landings during test now; the authorities recognised that people were being motivated to push the tests too much the old way.
IIRC one of the FTEs got a broken ankle or similar through being stood up when the "landing" occurred. There was a report on it I had lying around somewhere, there seemed to be a lot of people watching the instruments from what it implied.
Oh, and by the way, the aircraft
was not a complete write-off!!!
Douglas also badly damaged another aircraft around the same time - something about it running off the runway, and when they tried to use a crane to get it out of the mud the crane jib fell and smacked the forward fuselage. So now they had an aircraft with no forward fuselage and one with nothing much aft of the wing.
They stuck the salvageable bits back together (speed tape fixes anything
) and used the resulting Frankenstein aircraft as a test vehicle subsequently (it may have ended up as the UHB testbed?). (I can't recall all the details, word of mouth from a ex-Douglas FTE)