The flying blades then cause damage to whatever they hit, including the tail, the wing, and the fuel tank inside the wing. The damaged engine (or the more damaged engine, if both took a bird strike) falls off the airplane.
You then have two falling parts, the engine and the piece of the tail. Both are moving forward at 200 MPH at the moemnt they come off the plane. Which one will hit the ground at a point closer to the runway? Most likely the tail section.
Do a thought experiment, as Einstein called it. The engine is now basically a rock. The tail section, however, is still an airfoil with a large surface. Momentum will carry the engine forward as it falls. Air resistance will bring the tail section to a halt in the forward direction so it stops moving forward, and falls straight to the ground.
Imagine throwing a metal ball and an aluminum pizza tray at the same time at 200 MPH. The ball will travel farther forward than the tray, though the tray will take longer to hit the ground because wind resistence slows it on the way down, as well as stopping its forward momentum. Got the picture?
The fact that the upright section of the tail wound up in Jamaica Bay and the engine wound up in Rockaway, does not lead to any conclusions about how this aircraft was destroyed. It only demonstrates the difference between the descent of a compact, heavy object and a lighter-weight, large-surface area object from an altitude of 2,000 feet.
I'm just putting in laymen's terms a vigorous discussion of physics from yesterday's main thread. Trust me on this. I was a physics major at Yale until I realized that liberal arts majors had dates on weekends, drank beer, and had lives.
Congressman Billybob