Mike-wsm, do you remember the old TV game show (in the US) called "Name That Tune?" The premise was to tell the contestants something about the tune to be played. Then the contestants would hit their buzzers and suggest they could guess the tune in some number of notes. (The record is zero notes. They asked, "This is the theme from a 1940s musical that forever changed musical theater." There is only one such, "Oklahoma.")
The group of us are essentially playing "Name That Crash" with the little bits of information BEA vouchsafes us. This "tune" er Crash is strange enough I am not sure we'll all agree that a solution has been found even with CVR, FDR, and CMC (?) all recovered and readable and essentially the entire plane recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
I've learned that FDRs really do not store an exhaustive array of data that could tell us what the radar was showing, whether somebody dozed off at a critical instant, weather every outside the plane sensor froze up at about the same time, or any of dozens of other potential phenomena. So I am betting with myself that when this is all over we'll still be a few dollars short of a full set of clues. I for one am just suspicious enough of BEA's motives etc that I'd like to see their report audited by a second panel of experts. We certainly seem to have a plethora of really sharp experts here. I suspect that if this group and BEA arrive, ultimately, at different causes "I'd demand a recount" as it were bu a team of airplane accident investigators from all around the world.
This group will, ultimately, let me know of my native cynicism and paranoia should express itself.
For example, The fact that they built a 40 nm search radius for an event that went down in a violent storm in 4 minutes is just a small indictment of BEA's motives and expertise. Figure the plane's ground speed in 4 minutes. Figure it was PROBABLY (only probably) below a few thousand feet at the time of one of the last messages and guess how far the plane could be from the LKP. I am figuring 8 to 12nm. I am guessing more or less North. If they REALLY had claimed finding it 30nm South in a compact debris field I'd have raised holy heck about that.
I figure this group is providing a rather nice forum for this "reality check."
(I also love learning when not ordered to by somebody else. And I've had tremendous fun learning here. And I bet if the BEA takes good enough notes about recovery locations for specific objects some very interesting data for undersea currents in that area could be derived from the BEA data. I hope they do not waste THAT opportunity.)