If I may...
I noticed that there is a debate on the BEA report and the vertical acceleration and flight attitude at impact.
Post #3331 has a good point about linguistic considerations.
As a French native speaking, I feel that the key sentence in the BEA report is quite odd, grammatically incorrect. In contrast the rest (whole) of the document is quite well written and clear.
"l’avion a vraisemblablement heurté la surface de l’eau en ligne de vol, une forte accélération verticale." would translate as "the plane likely hit the water surface 'en ligne de vol', a strong vertical acceleration". (sic)
Again as a native French speaking it sounds like the author was not confident in this specific phrase or didn't understand what (s)he was writing.
Maybe you should get back to the hard facts (splatten things photos) and disregard this particular odd sentence.
Excuse my french, hope this helps, just my two cents...
Last edited by abricot; 8th Jul 2009 at 20:12.
Reason: excuse my french