and before I forget..thanks for all your great info.....
Could be that the forces that hitthe plane when the tail fell off triggered the shear or whatever it is, but that's still going to be an amazing coincidence. Could also be (WAG stuff here) that it's a pilot controlled system (seems safest) and the pilot thought they were going to hit the water (given where they were a controlled crash landing probably would have been on water, assuming they couldn't manage to turn the plane around). There's a lot of possibilities, that's what the NTSB is good at, they know how to look at the bolts and figure out why they aren't attached anymore. Every method of seperation leaves tell tail signs and can be detected by looking for those signs, even rotten metal can be figured out if you recover some of the metal (or if you recover none, that would tell you something right there).
Hope I spread more smarts than BS. Like I said I'm a generalist at heart, I know a little bit about a lot of stuff, my strength is being able to make what I know apply across fields. And I watch a lot of Discovery Channel on the holidays, they usually have stuff about crash investigation during the "drunk driving" holidays. Stay safe.