Unusual
What will have been very unusual for the crew will have been the over the nose visibility during the low speed, low altitude pass - the pitch attitude was so high that the trees may well have been hidden just behind the nose - cutoff angle over the nose, if I recall correctly, was 15 degrees down.
Believe it or not, even in an F-16 you have to fly a level, low speed pass on the old fashioned dial altimeter head down, because, sitting at 25 degrees AoA, the outside horizon is 10 degrees below your nose and the Flight Path Marker is way below the bottom of the HUD.
The Habsheim AF crew, in a way, just didn't know what they were really doing.
By the way, the scars in the trees can still be seen when you are on approach to BSL RW 15, an accident takes a long time to heal, in many aspects.