This sort of discussion has been coming up from time to time almost from the second day after the accident. Each time I’ve been racking my mind trying to imagine what terrible, unimaginable secret there could possibly exist to justify the things that some posters suppose.
The easiest way out would have been to declare shortly after the accident that the airplane must have hit a very strong gust that exceeded its design limits, it broke apart and the pieces fell to the earth. That would have been an ‘act of god’, nobody to blame, not Airbus, nor Air France, or DGAC. Not even a need to spend millions trying to find the recorders.
In its first Interim Report BEA went out of its way to argument that that didn’t happen. Their ‘finding’ may have been poorly worded, evidently hastily put together, and perhaps somewhat premature in the light of the meagre evidence and analysis available at that time. Nevertheless, it meant that BEA committed itself to a long and costly investigation that is still continuing.
In rejecting the theory of an immediate break-up, BEA must almost inescapably assume that a loss of control occurred, probably strongly related to the loss of airpeed indication. In that context, I still cannot imagine the inimaginable secret that would make the difference between disintegration at impact or sometime before that.
regards,
HN39
P.S. My thanks to GreatBear for expressing my feelings better than I could myself.