dalek you know no such thing. We can certainly agree that the catastrophic nature of the event made any type of controlled crash landing highly improbable. Can you tell me with 100% absolute certainty that a flight deck crew of aviators the caliber of Alfred Haynes and Dennis Fitch might not have accomplished a miracle?
We need to look no farther then the annals of any nations military aviation to find incidents of planes and/or people surviving catastrophic damage. The sad truth is that while events doomed the air-frame the specific cause of the crash was flight crew error.
How is it OK to argue that without the titanium strip none of the other deficiencies really matter yet dismiss the actual cause of the crash (FE's incorrect response). I'll use UA 232 as my argument. Had a less qualified flight crew destabilized the aircraft resulting in a high altitude loss of control and crash...many of you would be arguing the design flaws of the DC-10 as the root cause and dismissing the upset...since the plane was clearly doomed.
Yet more people lived then died that day. At the end of the day it's not really over till the aviator can no longer aviate. In this case the weakest link on the flight deck removed any opportunity for survival at a time when the plane was still capable of controlled flight.