Cause of death was landing halfway down a runway at high speed with no gear. Why were they cleared to land if they hadn't set flaps and locked gear? There was ocean in front of them both before and after their turn: landing there would have been more survivable than landing fast and hard with no gear. They were below minimum turnback altitude, and wouldn't have been able to complete the planned turn without the same power that could have been used to stay aloft and sort out their problems.
Nothing about this crash was normal, and talking about a thing past the end of the runway is misdirection.
Engine losses due to bird strike are pretty common. Planes declare an emergency and are vectored to a holding pattern where they run though emergency checklists and verify that they are ok to land at the current airport with current capabilities, weight, weather, etc. This takes 10 to 20 minutes.
According to the timeline I saw they were cleared before declaring an emergency. This means at the time of emergency the standard checklist required their gear had been locked and flaps set. Either they were not operating within regulation before they declared emergency, or they raised gear and retracted flaps below 900 AGL and decided to make an impossible turn instead of stabilizing their flight.
I don't know what happened in this event, but the concrete box is painfully uninteresting compared to basically anything that happened before it.
They had gear down, got a bird strike, did a go around, and retracted gear. At that point everything is fine and by the book but what happened next is the question - and why.
Either they would have actually "gone around" and executed the original approach (which would have been aborted when the gear didn't lock), or they had had mechanical problems and wouldn't have been able to make this 180º turn if they wanted to. There was ocean on three sides of them that would have provided a rough but survivable landing, as demonstrated a decade ago in New York.
At no point was this landing fine or by the book, and talking about ground obstructions is just a way to distract you.
