[BBKing]

Fascinating snippet of a mobile camera footage on Newsnight, but they never went back and reshowed it. They seemed to reach a fairly plausible consensus (despite Kirsty Wark having no clue) that the event struck quickly, late in the descent, no time to even get a mayday out, was unlikely to be loss of all power/electrics, was quite likely weather related and the flight crew did as good a job in the circumstances as could reasonably be expected, bringing the plane in level (no mean feat if you've not got flying airspeed, it only takes a wing to drop and you'll cartwheel it) and stopping slowly enough to avoid deceleration injury. I'm not sure about the latter being the crew's doing, though, since the ground's pretty soggy after days of rain round here.

We can estimate the rough landing length from Google Maps - about 1000-1200 feet from the last lighting gantry to where the plane stopped, which is about 1/3 the usual stopping distance, so about 3 times the deceleration if the plane had hit with landing speed, rather less if, as seems likely, the speed was down in the dirt (the video shows the nose pulled high but the plane sinking, suggesting very low speed indeed and being bled off in the air). Given that, the witnesses saying it was a hard landing but they didn't realise it was a crash until the masks came down, the doors came open, people shouted 'get off' and bits of undercarriage were visible through the wing seem quite plausible.