So, my question is:
if the aircraft (or any debris) is not gonna be found, what is the most likely scenario then? I'm not talking about the cause of the accident, but the last serie of events.
A ditching followed by sinking? An extraordinarly powerful explosion that actually "disintegrated" the aircraft?
Until the flight data recorder and CAM recording is found and played back, and decoded nobody can answer you. But we can make educated guesses. There is no evidence right now of an explosion. The pressurization message was the last received at 14 past the hour. In an explosion, you most likely would loose the pressure vessel immediately like UAL747 HNL, like TWA800. If the airplane fell off it's knifepoint (and at FL350 with that much fuel and pax aboard; it is sitting on a knifepoint), it isn't likely to come apart at high altitude. What most reporters in the press don't understand is that you can have a high speed stall above MMO that will drop you tens of thousands of feet, just as bad as a low speed stall will. (PJ2's Coffin Corner weight/alt point) You might not recover, if ever, until say (example only) 8,000 feet. At this point, "Lost in Saigon" and my theory goes, you are close to the cabin altitude of say 6,000 feet and will have pressurization problems when the two meet, "Catching the Cabin" (and that might be reported by acars.) That's if the wings or tail didn't come off already and rupture the pressure vessel from exceeding design limits in the dive. Many jet upsets have resulted in major structural damage. Recently an Adam Air 737 came apart in the dive in Indonesia (coincidentally near the equator also and as a result of the autopilot letting go, and the crew's inability to fly partial panel.)
But to answer CAT I, most of us don't want to wait years for the accident report which may or may not be revealing. When the ORD AA DC-10 facts came out, most of us didn't wait for the report. We V2 plus a bunch right after lift off. The government training to yank it back to V2 was dangerous and unnecessary and the pilot population deduced this for themselves: for all we know it saved someone somewhere.
Maybe as a result of our discussion, pilots will start clicking the autopilot off at altitude and get an idea of how it feels in the real airplane on a nice day. It's absurd, imho, for your first experience hand flying at FL350 to be on a dark and stormy night with half of the instruments not working and a flashlight clamped in your teeth.
Or, Maybe as a result of these postings, Air France will take note of crewmembers complaints of no dispatchers and no graphical weather updates available to the crew enroute and do something about it.
Stranger things have happened in Aviation.