When this is all said and done, not that I know much or anything about piloting a plane...IMO this is gonna be among the stupidest and easily avoided accidents of all time.
One air accident investigator I heard on the radio said that the one single thing you do not want to do is to fly into a thunderstorm. I can certainly accept that, though it surprises me to find out that it can bring down a plane.
But if that’s the case, and all it would have taken to avoid this disaster was to make a 90 degree turn and be an hour late for arrival, that seems completely insane not to place into the captains’ hands.
The captain had requested permission to fly around the storm but was denied due to heavy traffic in the area.
That storm he flew into was probably a Supercell with extreme downdraft and huge hailstones.
Perhaps I can help you to understand this phenomenon. Inside a thundercloud, the air is extremely turbulent, meaning it is moving in multiple directions violently. Every aircraft has a structural limit that the aircrew has to operate under, these are G (gravity) forces and are different for every airframe (an F-16 can handle more G forces than a 747). A civilian airliner can handle -1 to +2 G forces and a thunderstorm produces G forces in excess of that, often reaching +6. When an airliner encounters these turbulent winds, airframes break, starting with the weakest point of the aircraft and cascading to structural failure.