Originally Posted by grizzled
CFIT
The term has been used several times of late. As this is (intended to be) a technical forum, I feel compelled to mention that there is no possibility that this accident could be / will be classified as a "CFIT" occurrence.
Rather than take up space in a thread not related to definitions of aviation terminology I shall simply say that if you are not convinced (as I'm sure the techical people here are) feel free to PM me -- after googling "CFIT".
Thank you for your advice, but like it or not, I really used this term on purpose and I won't feel uncomfortable as providing a short definition which exactly fit with what I meant:
Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) describes an accident in which an airworthy aircraft, under pilot control, is unintentionally flown into the ground, a mountain, water, or an obstacle. The pilots are generally unaware of the danger until it is too late.
Reasons?
Even if it may look very unlikely to you, this attitude as described at impact may also look like a CFIT from my point of view. Without further details, a controlled flight can not be ruled out if she was not supposed to hit the water at the first place. I'm not saying here that she was in a process of recovering from a LOC/stall (whichever you like), as in this case, it would not be a CFIT
At first, I believed that she might have attempted to ditch. But for doing that in the middle of the Atlantic, at night in a stormy area, one would need a very good reason to do that: a fire on board (no trace) or absolutely no other option left (like being very low and no thrust left). A ditching scenario, taking into account this environment (night, storm, distance to the nearest coast) is almost a certain death for everybody on board.
Then, a quite remote possibility would be that:
If they were left with few thousands feet of altitude, but without engine, they could have attempted a last chance relight, hence a shallow dive to build up speed but without enough space and speed for fully getting out of it. In this case, inertia would give all the necessary vertical forces at impact.
In fact, it will also superficially look like a stalled impact but with an aircraft wings level and slightly pitched up, while a stall would be more likely in some different combined attitudes: either with a very fair ammount of nose up or nose down, and quite some bank, depending of the stall type... excepted, maybe, a flat spin without much trace of its spining momentum.
Now, I'm waiting for more clues to make my own opinion but I'm fearing that the later seems overall much more probable, still without ruling out the former.