“Still could have been a bomb.”
Yes, a bomb placed aboard the Airbus is one of the two most likely causes of the disintegration of the Airbus.
The other very likely cause of the disintegration of the Airbus is the tail strike damage caused by the aircraft’s tail striking the runway while landing in about 2001. Damage was caused to the stringers, aft pressure bulkhead, tail, fuselage skin, and so forth. The Russians claimed to have repaired and maintained proper inspections, but stress cracks in the composite structures can in many cases be difficult to impossible to detect without destructive testing methods.
The Soviet-Russian Tupelov TU-144 was designed with metal wings using single large castings, rather than numerous small metal castings fastened together to form a wing. When a stress fracture developed in the small casting, the fracture stopped spreading when it reached the edge of the small casting piece. Because the Russians chose to cast the wing in large single castings, stress fractures developed in the wing and were able to suddenly and catastrophically fracture through the entire wing before anything could be done to prevent a major emergency or loss of the aircraft. The TU-144 crash at the Paris Air Show was caused in part by the failure of the wing/s due to the G-forces encountered as the aircraft went into a dive and tried to pullout as they restarted its stalled engines.
In this new era of large commercial aircraft being built with composite materials as large and monolithic structures, some aeronautical engineers are questioning whether or not they may be prone to undetected stress fractures after so many cycles of pressurization-depressurization, G-force stresses, temperature changes, and other stresses. Since this Airbus was subjected to some very serious tail damage in about 2001, it is fair to assume the aircraft would be a likely candidate for a previously unseen stress fracture failure of the aft section of the Airbus. If so, the flash of heat observed by the intelligence satellite may have been caused by the an APU (Auxillliary Power Unite) located in the tail of the aircraft as the aft section of the fuselage and the tail broke off. Otherwise, the old damage and/or faulty maintence may have damaged the controls in a way which forced the elevator to pitch the nose of the aircraft towards the ground, and the aircraft’s increased speed in the dive caused the aircraft to breakup and explode.
A heater shot at a tgt at that altitude, speed and receding is not physically possible.
Sure it is possible. But hasn’t it been flying fine for 14 years with the repair it received?
I wonder if they obsess over just what can and cannot be carried on flights like we do here. If not, I wonder if there could have been a shoe bomb passenger or something like that.
Hopefully the black boxes will have the necessary info.