Ken (its shorter
) AAIB report appears to disagree with your damage assessment and suggests that hitting the ILS would not have been a good thing.
I appreciate you accepting that you may not have thought to raise the flaps, but hey, did you ever think, like many of us have done perhaps inwardly, that there also exists the possibility we would just have gone blank and sat there till the impact. I think the F/O may just have done that up to a point, but do you think any of us can appreciate his feeling of numbed disbelief that he was now piloting a glider whilst hoping that miraculously power might be restored before ground contact. Yes the A/P may not have optimised the glide performance by slavishly, as it was programmed to do, following the G/P BUT it flew the aircraft safely up until stick shaker, at which point the F/O took control and managed the best landing he could. Perhaps this could be run through a sim for session after session for months and indeed someone could come out with a different ? better? who knows ? outcome . . BUT, anyone playing this game is really not worthy of response as they are losing sight of the VERY big picture. . . . this being, that these guys were handed a totally untrained for emergency at a very late stage of an approach and managed to improvise enough to effect an arrival in a clear area that everyone, bar the poor bloke with the gear in his leg, managed to walk away from.
It is so easy to sit & pick holes in it with the benefit of hindsight, time, and a desk in front of you.
Once again I would suggest that everyone who has some lingering doubt here, listen again to the ATC tape & just try to imagine how quickly this unfolded between the calm readback of the landing clearance and the truncated mayday call followed by the ATC tx that they had crashed.
I know some will remain unconvinced, but really, with this little imagination what the hell do they know, and are they even worth responding to, for the rest of us, please guys, get real and try and imagine yourself in these guys shoes. If you can, & you are still convinced you would have done better, I suggest you need to either sober up or take a reality check.
Having been exonerated of any misdemeanour, indeed even praised in the report, I cannot imagine why some (and I am thinking particularly S.F.L.Y ) wish to (or even feel they have some expertise or right to ) subject him to trial by PPRuNe, this is laughable guys.
No-one can say how they would have reacted, no-one can say a better outcome could have been found, and yet still some want to continue with " what if, & how, & why didn't ,etc etc.
This is beyond ridiculous now.
These guys were handed @ 720 ft a glider, they realised this @ 480 ft and 35 seconds later put the aircraft in a place & in a fashion that enabled everyone to survive.
Which part of the BIG picture is it that you should not be in admiration of, that results in this spastic attempt to chew on the minutae of what you "would"
have done better.
Big reality check required for some posters.