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Old 2nd Nov 2015, 16:04
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Machinbird
 
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"Missing" Aft Fuselage

Just a theory at this point and I'm not seeing all the ground scars I would expect however here goes:

Once an aircraft loses its tail, it initially wants to tumble forward which can tear loose already torn portions of the fuselage near the original failure. That would likely account for strips of fuselage found in the desert in recent pictures, but it would take a prolonged time at high airspeed to shred the entire aft fuselage. This aircraft decelerated rapidly.

This aircraft hit in a flat inverted attitude. This may just be chance, however if the aircraft began an inverted flat spin it would greatly increase the probability of hitting in this attitude. If you look at the fuselage wreckage aerial pictures, the fuselage is bent in a V shape. I suspect that the wing had so much rotational inertia that it tore the wing box loose from the fuselage structure below it at impact and continued rotating and also translating aft due to the Left wing generating more purchase on the ground than the right wing. (remember that the aircraft is inverted when assigning right and left. The V in the fuselage debris was likely caused by the rotational momentum as well. The aircraft would have been rotating (counterclockwise as viewed from above) around its (new) center of gravity.

So the remainder of the missing aft fuselage is probably sitting under the wing which is no longer in its original position relative to the fuselage.
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