jcjeant
Thank you. Food for thought. It comes to mind that the tail (complete) is built as a mating of cantilevered stabilizers and articulating control surfaces. When confronted with an impact into the ground, or water, it fails as a unit, due to overwhelming and reasonably conforming and directional stress. Failure of individual surfaces and panels suggests a mix of stressors, rather than one massive arrestment. It is intuitive. An impact with the ground or water would then have a tendency to remove much of the tail at once. This suggests to me (not conclusively, but certainly as a result of patent failures), that 447's V/S came off as a result of stress that was not sufficient to remove panels and surfaces that were not attendant to lateral failure, eg: HS or dorsal skin. I consider it odd that the VS was found alone, likewise the elevator. This isn't probitive, but it meets the test of possibilities. The elevator has its trailing edge fractured from the main panel which has removed from the THS, but the TE remains attached to the elevator. This just doesn't square with a single and overwhelming failure of all the parts. Likewise, the splinter at the TE of the elevator should have been explosively removed, and here's the thing: Separating from the THS infers a separate stress from that which (is proposed per BEA); the description of impact by BEA would have the reader think that one impact was suffered by an all intact tail, there would have been no time separation for a sequential, and partial failure of any part, it had to come off the tail as a unit, like the V/S Rudder.
Any failure which served to have distributed parts in the SEA, would have thus been caused by the airstream, and prior to impact.
bear