If the wheel departed the plane on the landing at Raeford, the gear leg would have done so at RDU.
Perhaps that is what the co-pilot was trying to ascertain. Maybe they knew they lost the wheel, and wanted to know if they were going to land on a smooth belly or a peg leg. The wheel is visible to the aircrew, but the gear leg is blocked from nearly all angles by the fairing. IMO the only unobstructed view of the gear leg would be from the ramp when fully lowered, per the picture I posted a few pages ago.
One assumption we all seem to have accepted is that the landing (edit: the "hard landing" at Raeford) was the cause of the gear departing. But that is just an initial observation by people under great stress. Could well turn out that the wheel/gear departure was due to a maintenance error or some sort of structural fatigue. The crew might have just been the unlucky saps in the seat when the part decided to fail or the bolt loosened enough. That would make the suicide scenario doubly tragic.
The landing at RDU was a fine piece of piloting, BTW. He held that side up until the last minute. A peg leg landing at high speed could have rolled that plane up into a ball.
