My take is that the airplane should have been landed on a farmer's field straight ahead. It would have been a controlled crash, rather than an in flight stall and uncontrolled crash.
Agreed... But given the sheer size of the fire and the amount of fuel on board the survivability of such a controlled crash was nil.
That being said it is pretty clear that the pilots where not aware of the nature and scope of the fire. Remember that it took weeks to actually understand that it was not an engine fire !
Not specific to this accident but I still wonder why some micro cameras are not strategically placed on all modern airframes - they might save quite a few life IMHO