bird strike taking out both engines? nah.

This has to be pilot error. Even at stall, it looks like pilot didn't even try to level out.

I just saw that video and it is really strange. Not so much that rat hasn't been deployed, I don't think they lost hydraulics or electronics and I'm not sure they even reached the minimum speed where the rat would really help.

The strange thing is that it didn't really look like there was very much yaw or rolling which you would expect to see with a fuel system failure. They seemed to be flying straight as an arrow and gliding it down?

Maybe something wrong with thrust control? Kinda crazy.

is it going fast enough for the RAT to deploy?

Are the 787's controls arranged in such a way that you could accidentally retract the flaps instead of the landing gear?

Not in a sense that someone could just grab the wrong lever in the dark for example. The levers are in different parts of the cockpit and also shaped very differently. But we humans can do all kinds of weird mistakes that are hard to explain. Almost everyone has experienced this sometimes. Think something like searching for you phone while it's in your hand. Afterwards it's very hard to explain why would anyone do such a silly mistake but it still happened. This would be similar.

The plane was in takeoff config: https://imgur.com/a/JzS3ro9

According to type rated pilots the 787 doesn’t allow you to retract flaps immediately in critical flight after takeoff.

I think the simplest explanation, and the most likely one, is the pilots were too busy dealing with whatever shit was hitting the fan to raise the landing gear.

And, in my view, that's a loss of engine power for whatever reason, possibly bad fuel.

Damn, did I miss the plane crash expert unison chant again?

I don't get what you mean by "and no one figured that out yet." As you said yourself, no one knows what happened yet. Pretty much all we have at this point are the videos, and all we can confirm from them is a rough flight path of the plane and that the landing gear remained down after what appeared to be a normal takeoff. I haven't seen any footage that clearly shows the state of the flaps with any certainty, but please correct me if I've missed something.

In my mind, that leaves us with three possible scenarios:

• Pilot error (retracting the flaps instead of the landing gear)
• Dual engine failure at the critical moment (there's no evidence of this in the videos, but also nothing ruling it out)
• Something else (we don't know what we don't know)

From the two scenarios (pilot error, engine failure) that fit the flight path from the videos, the option one seems more plausible to me. But that’s just my armchair opinion, it doesn't mean anything. All we can really do is wait for the investigation and the preliminary report.