Not to nitpick...but....
"25 ft AGL" puts him over the fence or the underrun, not over the suburbs.
Should have done my own research instead of blithely quoting something I saw upthread, give me a second...
Okay, looks like 2 miles out, so he ought to have been under 1K, right? POSSIBLY even lower, if they didn't want a high descent rate during final and landing due to being down to a single engine. Reports from observers state that the plane was "flying extremely low" - sounds like WELL under 1K to me. Just checked online maps, and the crash location is just about right on 2 miles from the end of the runway; landing speed on the close order of 150mph gives us 48 seconds or so to the end of the runway. A thousand feet up at that point would require a 21fps descent rate - probably doable for a carrier-based aircraft (IIRC, they can handle up to 30fps, but don't remember where I read that and won't swear it's accurate), but limiting to 10fps would put him at under 500ft up - with gear and flaps down and two-engine failure (how long would hydraulics last, for control of the aircraft?), on an aircraft with a TINY glide ratio.
Yeah, unless we get further information indicating otherwise, I'm sticking with the belief that there was nothing the pilot could have done.
ETA: He EJECTED at 25AGL, not lost power there. That's where I got that, and was mixing the two up. And I'd forgotten that the F-18D is, apparently, fly-by-wire, so he needed electrical AND hydraulic power (for computers and wing/tail control surface deflections). Still don't know how long that would last with engines out.
