Machaca - excellent work!
BJ-ENG;
Don't underestimate hydraulic damage, particularly if the object is impacting in excess of 70M/s.
I agree.
Hatches in the bottom of the aft fuselage and tailcone structure provide a naturally-weak entry point for tremendous upward-directed hydraulic forces; - Forces which, throughout the length of the fuselage would "peel back" skin from their frames & ribs, weakening the entire supporting structure and providing essentially unimpeded exits for that which was recovered days later, all this occurring in the first few milliseconds.
I would have thought that the results of such high impact forces between water and an essentially-frangible hollow tube with heavy, specifically-located structures such as engines, landing gear, wing-boxes, spars and APU, would have been obvious but perhaps I am mistaken and that the violence of such a collision is being under-estimated.
For a notion of airframe fragmentation after a high-forward-speed impact one need examine just two examples: - the Turkish DC10 high-speed impact at Ermenonville, France, (450kts IIRC), and the SR111 MD11 impact (300kts) with the sea as another.
deSitter;
Here, not only what was recovered on the surface several days later, but what we thus far are permitted to see, if only dimly through remarkable photography of the site, is not "fragmented".
An entire wing section, (starboard) exists, with gear still attached; cabin structure is recognizable. When an entire galley unit, F/A seats, hundreds of parts of cabin material, doctor's kit, defibrilation kit, remain, the impact is not high-speed as seen in the two (of many) examples above.
In fact I posted links to the China Airlines A300 accident at Nagoya for this reason, and another poster cited the Afrikiyah A330 at Tripoli - both on hard surfaces. There is fragmenation, but not the kind one expects or sees in a high-speed impact.
I think it is reasonable to conclude at least, that this was not a high-forward-speed impact. I think an engineer's view of both structure and impact forces must be taken seriously at least until further evidence may lead us away from such an understanding.