I bet some passengers recorded voice and/or video on their cell phones as the plane descended. No idea if cell phones could have survived the crash.
No idea. But they could have called and or transmitted videos.
Cell phones as functioning devices wouldn't survive the crash. It is not even required of black boxes. What is required is that the memory in them remains readable in a lab. The same can happen to cell phones. Their entire solid state memory is a single Flash chip. It is not protected by the metal as it is done in black boxes, but short of being broken in half that silicon is pretty hardy. It may be that memory of some phones could be read. But will they even find them, if they can't find the second black box? And it's not like all passengers would be witnessing the attempts of the pilot to reach the controls. Probably only the first class - and would they, serious and busy people, be making video of that?
Certainly passengers witnessing a pilot trying to smash his way back into the cockpit would cause alarm and possibly cause some photos or audio to be taken by the passengers.
We will have to wait until all the evidence is gathered, and try not to jump to conclusions as was done in Ferguson Missouri. - Tom
Well, I know nothing about this stuff, but my phone syncs automatically to face book, so that photo would be there even if the phone itself was destroyed.