Salute!
Too much about ACARS and WX radar on the jets. And times for ACARS data not correlated with the flight recorders yet.
As Cog pointed out, at least one other plane flew thru the wx.
SOMETHING happened and the result was loss of control. I do not blame the crew.
I have flown thru the ocean CB's and they are nothing compared with a big CB over Kansas, USA. Whatever happened was before penetration of a line of storms. I use the Captain's body recovery to make the point that "things were going well until......"
Before I quit posting here for awhile, I shall bet that some sensor or input to the flight control system went haywire and the crew could not figure it out in time to do something constructive. My God, I just went thru the tech order for the jet and it is layer upon layer of inputs to the control system. Sheesh. Despite the plane's basic aero stability compared to the military jets that have FBW, it looks like even the most basic control laws still use many inputs from sensors. And some of those could be FUBAR.
The CVR will be more revealing than the basic flight data recorder, IMHO.
What did the crew see?
What were the flight conditions? When things went south, what was the environment? Were they pitching up and down and rolling left-right? I don't think so or the Captain would have been back in the cockpit.
SOMETHING happened before encountering the storms. The ACARS transmissions will soon be correlated with the flight recorders. We may be able to paint a picture of the final minutes or seconds. Findings will help to prevent another occurrence.
Although the Columbia breakup did not capture much crew talk, the flight dynamics were faithfully recorded. That tragedy took place very quickly despite indications on the recorder that something was terribly wrong 4 or 5 minutes beforehand. The crew didn't know, but at the last transmission they wanted to ask about something versus tire pressure in one of the wheels that the ground control was interested in.
sorry for the rant, and will stay silent for a bit.
P.S. The IAF guy on board Columbia was a student of mine in the F-16. I have a patch from that IAF bunch, and the IAF only sent one small group to check out in the first operational FBW jet in the world. So I have a special interest in incidents involving FBW planes, having been one of the first to fly the damned things.