[eno_]

My theory is a main tire exploded after stowing (first rumble), causing damage to fuel feed line and pumps within the wheel well. This downed a 727 in Mexico in the 70s which caused the segregation and protection of hydraulics and fuel lines running within the wheel wells. This lesson has been lost on modern aircraft designers which routinely run hydraulics and fuel lines through the wheel wells without any shrapnel protection. The second rumble was the engine starting to miss from lack of fuel and going into a series of compressor surges that loosen something that hit the tail causing lost of rudder control (three violent full swings were recorded).

Truly excellent analysis! But wouldn't a tire exploding be picked up on the CVR? Or, for that matter, if a tire can explode and not be picked up on a cockpit audio recording, could a bomb explode in the luggage and not be picked up? In either case, I think you are correct that it was a loss of controls due to some kind of failure, explosion, incendiary, etc. This is consistent with eyewitness reports of a "flash" and debris coming from the wing-root.

I also think the loss of the vert stab and engines were both due to air load, not a g-load on the engines. That would have sent the engines in opposite directions. They were found near each other. I also doubt there was sufficient energy in the system to create such a g-load. The engines, after all, have to stay on at maximum thrust. But get the cowling sideways, and the mass of the airplane becomes the hammer and the air becomes the anvil.

[alloysteel]

Going back to this problem with the yaw that would have occurred in a climbing turn, by failure of the vertical fin on the rudder. The first response of the airframe based on physics would be to move out at a straight vector from the point where the tail fin became detached, as there was no further force application to continue the turn. Then, in a effort by the pilot to compensate, greater power was applied to the engine on the outside radius of the (formerly) curvilinear path, which is now proceeding out at a tangent. This caused the now rudderless airframe to spin like a boomerang, all the while with increasing engine speed on the outside engine. But now the plane of rotation is turned sharply, on both engines, which are, remember, essentially huge gyroscopes, and in attempting to maintain the motion vectors, twist OFF their pylon mounts and fall away from the plane.

This brings us back to the original question - why did the vertical tail fin mounts, and consequently the rudder mechanism, fail?