“If I would have put it in the water, it would have killed us all,” he told The Intercept. “I had no flaps [to slow the plane],
Interestingly, when Nimrod R1 XW666 ditched in the Moray Firth in May 1995, it did so with zero flap, contrary to the FRC Ditching Drill that required 40 degrees flap. This was because of a sound airmanship decision by the fantastic Flt Deck crew (Art, Pat and Dave), due to the rapid failure of the primary and secondary (flap) hydraulic systems, and the potential (unknown) failure of the flap servodyne interconnecting cable, which could have led to an asymmetric flap condition.
I always wondered whether zero flap was the way to go given that it had been proven empirically to work (albeit once on type), rather than theoretically.