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.
“Sure it is possible. But hasn’t it been flying fine for 14 years with the repair it received?”
Yes, but that is exactly what you would expect with that kind of a stress fracture in a monolithic structure. Aluminum aircraft, commercial and military, are rebuilt and/or retired after so many cycles and flight hours to avoid undetected metal fatigue failures from occurring in flight. In cases such as the novel wings of the TU-144 or the latest composite material aircraft, the engineering assumptions have not yet had sufficient time to reveal whether or not the forecast assumptions about composite material fatigue are fully reliable or not. See what happened with the de Havilland Comet air disasters and how their engineering assumptions about metal fatigue proved to have fatal flaws. Also look at what happened to a 131st Tactical Fighter Wing F-15 when it prematurely cracked and broke apart in mid-air, grounding the fleet of F-15 aircraft. My test pilot uncle and his crew were killed during World War Two when a aircraft manufacturer failed to understand and recognize the metal fatigue in his patrol bomber aircraft caused it to disintegrate during testing over the bombing range.