You can not make a “soft landing” on water... the wheels don’t roll so well there, so on most planes you take a water landing gear up. So here you are on a very fast surfboard with outriggers and dragging an anchor ... and those are gonna dig in pretty darn fast and hard, which means you come to a stop very fast... unless you’re really lucky that day and the nose manages to dig in and flip the plane.
Water is not soft when you’re going over a hundred miles an hour.
Darned tootin’ the passengers were warned to BRACE before landing! And this time, the stews probably had time to go down the aisles and correct the positioning of more than a few of them.
Y’know, this may be the first successful (as in, the plane stayed together) ditching I’ve ever heard of involving a plane with wing-mounted high-bypass engines. There’ve been ditchings in the past with DC-8s and maybe 707s, and I think there was a 727 wreck where the plane did a controlled flight into water and most of the people got out (and a Caribbean ditching with a DC-9 where about 2/3 survived). But I’d always heard that it was supposedly impossible to successfully ditch a plane with wing-mounted high-bypass engines, because those big intakes would act like scoops and either rip the wings off or flip the plane over. So much for that, I guess!
}:-)4