@leightman,
No point of impact
There is little explicit official information on this. But ...
A. The searchers use maps that have an initial or main point of impact on it, you can Google them, and some maps have a 'spread of fragments' boundary line.
B. I read about an official reference coordinate for the point of impact, some maps showed that coordinate, i have not tried to match or correlate those maps to check them for accuracy, perhaps somebody else has,
C. There was a single statement in an article about the plane hitting 'a lower mountain first with the right wing', before having the main impact .... I have seen no confirmation of this. I have not tried to match available debris photos with that dual impact statement. An answer to this is a required small piece in the full puzzle.
D. It has been stated in a few articles and apparently quoting officials ... That to be sure, the search area is wider than the 'impact plus area' ... Because they want to check if the plane lost parts before reaching the impact area. I dont know if that effort continued after the 'intentional crash' came out.
All this will need to be confirmed by the investigation. And they are working very systematically to that end as far as I can see. The mountain road that they are building now will help to speed up the whole process. Just saying 'the guy did it' is not enough for improving safety, for professionals and i imagine also not enough for the relatives. They need to go all the way, and literally show it.
Let's hope that the quality of the work on the ground will be joined by improved communication to public and press. Statements of a French Gendarmerie official embedded in the German Polizei team in Duesseldorf ... And separate statements by the French and German procureur and Staatsanwalt.... Next to the BEA.... Requires more streamlining and international coordination. I know that everyone has his own procedural and legal obligations to fulfill, but still. Need for improvement on this point should end up in a lessons learned report. It would even expect some statements on this in the Final BEA+ Report.
I am fortunate because I am well able to read french, german and english. But even with that knowledge it takes substantial time to correctly match and check statements. For investigative purposes english could be leading. That will be much harder for the judicial side. A remedy for the that could be sending out own language statements always joined by a formal english translation. Spain and Catalunia have, it appears, positioned themselves behind the French/German effort. That is commendable from the communication point of view.