This is a very interesting incident in that it is (on first blush only) nearly identical to the Asiana incident at SFO. If the current hypothesis (that the crew went around and expected the AT to spool up the engines, when in fact they hadn't engaged TOGA for whatever reasons) then it is a fact that the evolution of both incidents was pretty much identical: Crew makes large pitch change that requires excess thrust to compensate for and expects AT to react accordingly, and within a few seconds things fall apart as the aircraft sheds airspeed because there was no corresponding increase in thrust.
And in both cases the failure to monitor the throttles happened in the final phase of landing, and in both cases it happened when things were not as expected. (Asiana was not stabilized and was high and hot for way too long, EK 521 appears to have bounced the landing for whatever reasons...) But in any case this would represent the second time in several years that a 777 was a total loss due to the crew failing to properly manage the AT in a critical phase of the landing process.
It could be a training failure, it could be a programming failure, it could be both, or it could be something else, but what I am seeing here is a specific problem with (at least) the 777 series, one that Boeing and regulators need to recognize, acknowledge, and work to ameliorate.
This is obviously all speculative at this point, but the similarities are surprisingly close, as is the outcome- it will be interesting to see if these two incidents result in a major phase or process shift in either training or operations, and/or in the programming of the machine itself.
Cheers,
dce