Sorry, folks, nobody is sitting on any orange rafts. If there was the remotest possibility of that the airline would be the first to believe it. And they have stated there is no hope.
If the ACARS reports were the result of the beginning of an in-flight break-up sequence due to extremely severe turbulence (which can, btw, destroy any aircraft) all electrical power would have been lost immediately afterwards. One assumes AF speculated about a lightning strike as a way of explaining the sudden loss of the transponder at altitude.
The puzzle is what they were doing flying "into" (AF's word, not media's) a thunderstorm.
As far as searches are concerned, the priority will be the black boxes, although if there was a sudden in-flight break-up, they will show nothing after the power loss. No one will attempt to recover engines or anything else, in fact, that is not relevant to the investigation.
As for the power-off qualities of the A330, don’t forget the Air Transat pilot who glided one over 20 minutes to a safe landing on the Azores after fuel exhaustion at FL30 or so.
As a previous poster mentioned, composites do not necessarily behave well in lightning strikes. The Super Puma crash in the North Sea after a tail rotor failure showed unexpected vulnerability to lightning and the presence of much higher discharges from lightning than was provided for in the lightning protection standards. This has much to do with particular composite designs and of course it will have no applicability to this disaster unless it is proved this plane was hit by lightning. If it was, the wreckage will show it.
Last edited by Frangible; 1st Jun 2009 at 16:17.