[Roosta]

Originally Posted by William May ↗

The main hydraulic pumps are on the engines, but there are 3 other electric pumps that kick in when they see hydraulic pressure loss from engine shutdown. There also is a RAT (Ram air turbine) that pops out of the nose when it senses loss of all engine power. It provides electricity and hydraulics to keep the flight controls going, and put down the gear. (All the heavy electronics are dumped. It only supplies the emer flight indicator panel, which has a turn and bank, altimeter, and airspeed on it. All the rest of the instruments are dumped as well.) Also, the APU can run the aux hydraulics and keep all normal power on. But if the APU was not running, they would be out of luck with that. No time to do an APU start in the minute or so they had left.
If only they had stayed closer to the median in the center, they might have made it successfully.

Very acute angle as well.

Looks like they everything that they could to line it up but the sheer weight of the aircraft & the rate of decent with both engines out would have been past the glide recovery envelope, so they couldn't have done much more IMO to preserve as much life as possible & a few got out, thank fuck !
It also doesn't really help when the fuel is in the wings & you hit a solid sound wall.

IMO, the pilots given the reaction time factor & rate of decent, that they had to make life & death decisions in, they couldn't have really done any better.

[William May]

They were high-time pilots as well. One of them had over 24,000 hours, so he must have been retired airline pilot or something. It takes YEARS to get to 20,000 hours of flight time!

[nearestexit]

If what appears to be the pilot on fire dropping from what's left of the cockpit is real, he apparently was able to get up and walk (or crawl) about 50 feet before collapsing, as evidenced by the two, blue tarps apparently covering the pilots' bodies in the attached photo.