Your practice autos will not normally slide that much. However (and thankfully, I do not have any experience with ANY actual autos, much less 200' 90° night autos to freeways!), it looks like they played the cards they were dealt. It seemed to be excellent CRM - the pilot flew the auto, and the TFO communicated as much as he could to the dispatcher in the short time they had available. Absolutely shit hot job. Nobody was injured, the aircraft came away without a scratch (except for the motor, obviously), and the pilot will never buy a beer when in the presence of his TFO ever again.
FWIW, the closest I ever came to an actual auto was in the Phrog, when I was setting up the topping on one of our engines. We were blue-water ops, and since it was hot as balls, I decided to climb to 2000' to get some Phroggy air conditioning. When you're topping a Phrog engine, you bring the "good" engine to idle when you're making your topping adjustment on the "bad" one. You're operating on a single engine, which is generally no biggie on an FCF hop. Well, as fate would have it, thanks to a faulty fuel control, the engine I was topping decided to roll back on me - I suddenly had two engines at idle. I was at the controls and immediately dumped the collective and nosed it over to get the turns up. My copilot brought the good engine back online, which, even though he brought it up immediately, took 3-4 seconds to spool up to 100%. My crew chief and AO, meanwhile, immediately started strapping themselves into their seats. When all was said and done, we lost 1200' of altitude, but recovered safely. Needless to say, we knocked off the FCF after that, and I spent that night pulling the seat cushion out of my keister.
Not the craziest story ever, I know, but it validated years of training by hammering home two points:
1. Turns are life. If you suspect an engine failure, never hesitate to lower the collective and preserve Nr. Even in a dual- (or triple-)engine bird, get the turns under control, then focus on your single- or dual-engine procedures. When the engine dies, you're making withdrawals from the Nr bank with no chance of a deposit. When Nr gets below a certain level, you're done. Keep the turns up!
2. CRM, CRM, CRM! Thanks to a good cockpit brief, a thorough brief of the FCF steps (before initiating the procedures), and solid systems knowledge by all crewmembers, I initiated the auto, the copilot knew what was happening (he quickly scanned the gauges when he heard Nr winding down) and initiated our pre-briefed recovery procedures, and the aircrew (by hearing the engines drop offline and Nr decay) knew we were in trouble and got prepared for impact. There simply wasn't enough time to "think" things through - time-sensitive decisions had to be made based on training, briefing, and experience.
Anyway, I hope the SAPD "higher" recognizes just how phenomenal of a job this crew did. Many lives, and expensive assets, were saved that day.