Aspen
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I thought about this possibility for a while but I don't think its the case. If gear collapsed, then there is no way on earth that it could have retracted back into the gear hold in such a clean way that is seen in the picture. Look at what happened on BA38 when gear collapsed, it ripped into the wing. If gear collapsed, it would've gone through wing which we can tell did not happen by looking at pic. So that rules out locking problem on gear.
Belly landing is also not possible because in the pic, plane only has damage on the engines, a belly landing would have damage on tail area as well.
Pilots forgetting to extend the gear in the first place is also unlikely as there are too many alarms for somebody to forget to extend it.
The one possibility I can think of that solves everything is that pilots were coming in too fast too high on an unstable approach. One of the most common ways to slow down quickly during approach is to drop the gear earlier to create more drag. But there is a restriction on how fast you can go before deploying the gear. If you are going too fast to safely extend the landing gear, you get an audible warning "gear unsafe" in the cockpit. So it does not have to be a problem with landing gear itself, it could be that they were going too fast to extend it. A too fast too high approach would also explain an unstable landing and hard bounce that would later need to be aborted.
On other points, skid marks on engine don't indicate anything about nose gear so that is irrelevant.
RAT does have relation to both landing gear and engines actually. Normally, engines provide power to hydraulics which powers landing gear. But if there is a dual engine failure, RAT replaces engines as power source for hydraulics. In this RAT is useless as well because hydraulic fluid is leaking out from the same place that oil is leaking out which shut down the engines in the first place. If that scrape on the bottom of the engine didn't happen, RAT would have worked as the hydraulic fluid would not be leaking out and RAT would have been able to power the hydraulics. But in that situation, the engines would also be working and then RAT would not even be needed since the oil would not be leaking causing engines to overheat and triggering automatic shutdown since oil and hydraulics are both leaking from the same scraped area.
I do not think there was any belly landing, that would have caused way more damage to underside than we see in that picture. But there was a brief scrape of engines after bounce gear retraction when airplane sank to contact ground before TOGA thrust kicked in.
Even if it is gear then flaps, you are still supposed to wait until positive rate to retract the gear. I could definitely see a situation where pilot aborted an unstable landing and was waiting for positive rate to retract gear and thought the bounce or float was positive rate and retracted gear prematurely. If TOGA thrust took a moment to kick in after gear was retracted, it's enough time for plane to sink back down when engines scraped the runway at 4700 and 5000ft. I wonder if its possible that they retracted gear before hitting TOGA thrust by mistake. The pilots would have probably have decided to abort after the first hard bounce from unstable landing and then retracted the gear as part of procedure but in the wrong sequence. A long float down the runway would suggest they hesitated or delayed to apply TOGA thrust for a few seconds even though they had already retracted the gear which essentially means they already committed to going around. Retracting gear before applying TOGA is a huge mistake and I doubt they would've made this mistake. In my opinion it is more likely that they applied TOGA first and then retracted gear but TOGA took a moment to spool up and plane sank down to ground and engines made contact with runway after gear retracted but before TOGA fully spooled up. Whole situation could have been avoided if they just waited a few more seconds for TOGA to fully spool before retracting gear so that engine doesn't scrape and get damaged. Then it would've been a normal go around and plane would've landed safely.
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