Some thoughts on interpreting the final wreckage image at
https://ibb.co/kvz8N6
When I first noticed the crossways ditch, I thought it was something the farmer dug. This was some kind of squash/pumpkin patch, and the reports mention the wreckage among the squash. But the ditch doesn't seem to collect from anywhere or debouch to anywhere. There are no other ditches in the area.
Perhaps the farmer dug a ditch that has a slight dogleg that matches an Electra dihedral. Perhaps he dug it where a plane would crash a few days later. I can't prove it one way or another. If anyone wants to weigh in on that, have at it.
But let's hypothesize for the moment that this was an artifact of the crash, and let's see where that hypothesis leads us. This is how science is done.
Let's say the plane was sliding nose-first to its final destination, and as it slowed it was digging into the soft ground. As dirt built up ahead of it it would tend to dig in even more. As the weight of ground slowed it, the tail would start to kick up, sort of like a car hitting a retaining wall. At some point the tail would pitch over.
If the ditch were dug by the leading edges, it would have roughly the plan it does. But it shows no sign of dirt scooping from the left side. Instead the ditch is quite symmetrical, near as we can judge. So if the ditch was caused by the leading edge, the leading edge was coming down from some height. It need not have been coming down vertically, but it must have been coming down at not much more than the slope angle of the left wall of the ditch. Let's say 30 degrees for convenience.
Here's an experiment you can safely do at home. Take a kleenex box and put it on the desk in front of you, and imagine some line at which the sliding plane would scoop enough dirt that it would hit the retaining wall and start to pitch over. The box long side is the fuselage long dimension; the short side is the fuselage width. Slide the box until it hits the retaining wall point and tilt it over. It briefly stands on its short side, and then tilts on over to rest on the cabin roof.
The box is now as far from your retaining wall line as the box is tall. If you assume some skidding it might be farther, but it can't be less. The top of the cabin is a fulcrum on which the fuselage will rotate, and the more intact the cabin the farther from the ditch it will land.
If you like, chop a bevel in your kleenex box to simulate a partially collapsed cabin. The box will end up not quite so far away, but still well clear of the ditch. If you don't want to tear up your kleenex box, it's all illustrated on page 54 of my document.
https://we.tl/beXUsgYPvX
In the image in question, the only way for the plane to end up athwart the ditch is for it to bounce into the air. The cabin height is 13 feet. This means (if the ditch is an artifact of this crash) that the plane bounced at least 13 feet into the air.
What drove this bounce? Electra wings are notoriously stiff vertically. This plane had been through the LEAP program so they were even stiffer. I have no data on fore-and-aft elasticity of Electra wings, but I'm prepared to say they had virtually none. But the main gear was present, the inboard nacelles were stripped, and the main gear seems to my untutored eye like an adequate explanation for the bounce.
So I conjecture that the plane came down at an angle, the wings cut the visible ditch, the main gear bounced the plane back up at least 13 feet, as it continued to pitch over.
I don't know the angle it came down at. It might have been near vertical, it might have been anything down to the slope angle of the ditch left wall. I doubt it could have been much less, but depending on the dirt collapse it is unclear. The issue here is not how high the plane was as it descended, but how much energy it had. It need not have come down from more than 13 feet in order to bounce 13 feet.
This tells me the plane arrived at the final site not by sliding but by some aerial trajectory of mostly unknown specifics.
If anyone would like to propose an alternate explanation for what we see, I'd be delighted to hear it. This is simply what the picture says to me.