Agree L6. But to them dropping the gear would be to gain some control and not for a ditching. I can't imagine these 3 souls would have just ridden it down without reconfiguring. We don't know the sequence yet, maybe they spun, slung the engine/s, were able to recover somewhat, and couldn't unstall because of an aft cg of the reduced configuration. Could we tell if the engines departed through the boxes.