The crash on the second landing attempt is just a the conscience of the bird strike, not the actual event.
Apparently this aircraft was just old enough that the black boxes weren't required to be hooked up to any of the redundant power buses.
There are multiple busses, but you almost always have an option to tie the two busses together, so one generator can drive both sets of loads. You can also add a battery through an inverter to carry loads. You can also turn on the APU and use it's output to drive loads.
They may have had a more severe failure.
It's also not that important to restore AC power. The standby bus automatically brings the standby instruments online in the event of a failure, and not that hard to restore the majority of instruments by connecting the main DC bus to batteries. The battery has enough power for 30min of flying, or a full hour if you have the dual-battery option.
> They may have had a more severe failure.
While we only have evidence of bird strikes on one engine, the actions of the pilots seem to suggest that they lost both engines. They were rushing to get back to a runway.
Also is not instant, will take a minute or two. The APU is a turbine that takes time to start. Maybe they did turn in on, but 2 minutes too late. We don’t know.
He was a super pilot, who had extreme good understanding of all systems in the plane, and many ours on that plane. You cannot expect that (and do both want that!) from an average pilot. It seems right now that this very accident may have been caused by not following the procedures.
"Although the flight crew was only able to complete about one-third of the Engine Dual Failure checklist, immediately after the bird strike, the captain did accomplish one critical item that the flight crew did not reach in the checklist: starting the APU. Starting the APU early in the accident sequence proved to be critical because it improved the outcome of the ditching by ensuring that electrical power was available to the airplane. Further, if the captain had not started the APU, the airplane would not have remained in normal law mode. This critical step would not have been completed if the flight crew had simply followed the order of the items in the checklist.
The NTSB concludes that, despite being unable to complete the Engine Dual Failure checklist, the captain started the APU, which improved the outcome of the ditching by ensuring that a primary source of electrical power was available to the airplane and that the airplane remained in normal law and maintained the flight envelope protections, one of which protects against a stall."
The final report also gave a new safety recommendation (A-10-66, p. 124) to develop more appropriate (shorter) checklist for dual-engine failure specifically for low-altitude incidents.
Thanks for citing the report, which I was too lazy to do. That is my point, as I was replying to “it is just one button” comment. If you do the procedures in the right order, it could be they didn’t have the time to start the APU