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damian2000

The pilots attempted to go around at the last second, when it was already too late - if the pilots had not attempted to go around, i.e. not piled on the throttle at the last second - just wondering - would the crash have been as severe?

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It would have been worse^. Throttle response is far from instantaneous (jets spool relatively slowly), and any speed that they did manage to gain contributed greatly to lift and almost certainly lessened the force of the impact.

Throttling up a plane for a go around is not at all analogous to stepping on the gas while crashing into a brick wall.

^ total speculation

They made the runway, it's how they were able to interview the pilots. If they hadn't done anything, I'd expect more of the plane would have hit the seawall instead of just the tail gear. It probably would have been much worse.

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