[sandude]

The guess is that a terrorist came into the cockpit and the pilot made rudder deflections to try to throw him off balance and it resulted in a full rudder deflection that caused it to rip off the horizontal stabilizer, dooming the aircraft.

I hadn't heard this theory before. It makes some sense but Airbus still needs to build planes that won't come apart, no matter what a pilot does to manuever the jet. By the way it's good to have you back on the case Holmes.

[Sherlock]

Thanks. The lady that's head of the NTSB (I think it was) held a news conference on this. I'm not so sure it was strictly an Airbus problem, it was pretty much a warning to all pilots that even small rudder movements, which is apparently what were detected on the flight data recorder, can result in a full deflection like happened in this case. I think the airspeed might have been a factor one way or the other too. It was at least 6 months ago this information was released.