Look at post #884. Yeah, the one just above your's. Eyewitness: saw a flash at the
wing root, nothing unusual,
no smoke beforehand unlike those unattributed "pilot of the plane behind this one" reports. It's American, it's New York, baggage screening still sucks, Bush and the UNGA are in town, Osama said more would crash. I have no dog in this fight, but excuuuuuuuse me for thinking it is more likely a bomb than a spontaneous catastrophic failure.
Ever been in bad (stuff flying all over the cabin, people screaming) turbulence? Your biggest worry is the seatbelt giving way and you breaking your neck against the cabin interior. Wings don't fall off, even when it feels like Mother Nature is PMSing all over the plane.
I'll go you one better than being in bad turbulence, eno. I've had a jet engine come apart on me before. I've picked up crash sites where there was a catastrophic failure, and we could find all but the inlet fan module (three feet wide, weighing about 400lbs) after the crash. Seems that the there was a failure in the numbers 2 and 3 bearings and the torque was so great that the module was wrenched off the rest of the engine...shearing all one hundred and something bolts, connecting cables and everything else, and throwing the module through the fuselage of the F-15 the engine was installed in. The A/C flew on for about five more minutes before coming apart completely on the pilot.
Flash at the wingroot...ever seen how much debris an engine can throw out when it fails? If it shells out, you'll get a bright flash, and a lot of fire if it penetrates a fuel cell.
Wings fall off if you damage them (fragments will shear wing spars) and then you stress them. Oh, and these fragments...we're not talking little pieces here, we're talking large chunks of metal that weigh a lot...forty-fifty pounds...bigger than any shrapnel put out by missile.