Originally Posted by
OVERTALK
[...]
Large unintended rudder deflections during a high-speed LoC event may have partly detached the vertical stabilizer from its mounts, or even locked the rudder at a significant deflection.
Only problem with that is that the mounts didn't fail (or rather the VS didn't fail around the mount points, as it did in with aa587) - they were still attached to the VS, but ripped out of the fuselage.
Something clearly happened to take the a/c back to where the search is now though. My feeling is that it was in the air, possibly with control partially recovered, for longer than thought - but I don't have any way to explain loss of satcom to back that up.