Yeah I'd imagine that was the reason for the approach, but still considering the length of the runway they had no chance of stopping at that speed. As you said the reason why they went with that configuration is key and which systems were in operation at the time. Bird strike taking the taking out the hydraulics would be really misfortunate and very rare occasion. Engines from what I see were working. Even with one engine it should be a protocol landing if other systems were in place.
Water landing is never a good option unless is favorable conditions and shallow waters.
Their approach seems to have been slightly unstable, with both vertical and horizontal deviations from the glide path:
In order for both recorders and the ADS-B cutting out at the same time, the only plausible scenario how that would happen is the loss of both electric generators. The aircraft would then fall back on battery power, and all three systems are not among the list of things supplied by those. On a newer aircraft both recorders would have their own backup batteries, but when this older 737-800 was built this wasn't in the regulations yet and retrofitting them was not made mandatory. It also appears the pilots did not start up the APU in the short time until the crash landing, or else the recorders should have started up again.
It makes knowing the entirety of what happened in the last minutes pretty much impossible. Pretty much everything from that moment on can only be guessed and inferred from what can be seen from the outside, the radar data and videos. It might still help with clearing up what happened directly after the bird strike, depending on how much the recorders still caught. If the pilots really shut down the wrong engine like some people keep suspecting it might still be in those last seconds of data.
Jeez. Like a bigger version of insects on a windshield.The preliminary report was released today. I'm not even going to bother linking it because frankly, it offers no new information, it just rehashes what has already been reported everywhere, such as the number of victims, the aircraft type and age, the pilot and copilot's experience, etc. It is overall a very short read with quite little information.
The only slightly new information it provides is that it confirms that indeed both engines have blood, feathers and other traces of bird collision. The birds have been identified as being Baikal teals, a duck species weighing about a pound on average. While that is not very large, the amount of birds might have well made up for their individually rather low weight. The area is well known for its bird habitats and the large swarms that can occur there. It's far from impossible that the each engine has been hit with numerous birds in short succession. What that can look like has been rather impressively shown by a recent UPS cargo flight, where an MD-11 crossed paths with a large-ish flock but was able to continue without major damage:
The preliminary report was released today. I'm not even going to bother linking it because frankly, it offers no new information, it just rehashes what has already been reported everywhere, such as the number of victims, the aircraft type and age, the pilot and copilot's experience, etc. It is overall a very short read with quite little information.
The only slightly new information it provides is that it confirms that indeed both engines have blood, feathers and other traces of bird collision. The birds have been identified as being Baikal teals, a duck species weighing about a pound on average. While that is not very large, the amount of birds might have well made up for their individually rather low weight. The area is well known for its bird habitats and the large swarms that can occur there. It's far from impossible that the each engine has been hit with numerous birds in short succession. What that can look like has been rather impressively shown by a recent UPS cargo flight, where an MD-11 crossed paths with a large-ish flock but was able to continue without major damage:
We know from the images that they still had at least partial thrust on the right engine, and we know that the pilots knew that since they opened the thrust reversers on that side.
yeah that's my read of the situation as well. Shame with missing FDR data we would never be sure what exactly happened, but traces of birds doesn't mean it took both engines out. They might thought they lost thrust and keep the flaps up not to come short to the runway, although they did overshoot the landing spot and with all the chaos in the cockpit they might have came late to deploy the landing gear and set the flaps in correct position upon landing.
Not how that works. Not every hydraulics system powers every system:
We know that this was not the case because at the very least the electric system had failed / fallen back to battery power at most, as shown by the loss of ADS-B, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, as well as the external lights looking to have been inoperable. And as said above, even if system B was in operation, that does not mean that the rest of the systems were as well as system B only powers some of them. Hydraulic gear deployment or ground spoilers for example would not have been available on that system.
Not how that works. Not every hydraulics system powers every system:
The right thrust reverser being open only means that they either had system B or the standby reservoir available. Depending on which of the two was used it can mean different things as for what other systems they had available, with the standby system obviously resulting in far less options than system B. In that case they'd only have had the reversers, the rudder and the leading edge slats/flaps.
We know that this was not the case because at the very least the electric system had failed / fallen back to battery power at most, as shown by the loss of ADS-B, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, as well as the external lights looking to have been inoperable. And as said above, even if system B was in operation, that does not mean that the rest of the systems were as well as system B only powers some of them. Hydraulic gear deployment or ground spoilers for example would not have been available on that system.
As said before, the loss of the recorders might well mean that there will never be a definitive answer on what the pilots did or did not have available to them, and how overwhelmed by the situation they might have been. I am not that deep into accident forensics that I'd know how much they can still gain from this thoroughly crashed and burnt-out wreckage, but I'd not hope for too much and am rather expecting a case that will never be satisfyingly clear.
