Originally Posted by
unworry
A former colleague suggested this evening that a large piece of rudder or stabilizer were found early on in the search and reasonably intact ... some distance from the now main site of the fuselage wreckage.
Can anyone confirm this was the case or care to speculate whether a failure in the empennage could explain the profile suggested by the ADS-B data.
Honestly wondering ...
Problem is that finding the vertical stabilizer intact and separate from the rest of the wreckage is not an indication of pre-impact separation - they are pretty strong, in a relatively protected position in most impacts, and tend to come off in one piece.
XL888 vertical stabilizer was found intact, and floating, as was AF447. In the 447 case we had a few years of speculation on here about attachment failure (cf. AA587) before the black boxes confirmed it was an intact impact.