Look. Since the "rudder, tail whatever" (grin) was not physically with the bulk of the plane that splashed into a Rockaway neighborhood, you *bet* they are going to look hard at it. Right now, they are just gathering facts, and that parts of the plane fell off and landed in Jamaica Bay is an absolutely fascinating, important fact. It could provide evidence for or against many opf the theories being discussed here -- and no doubt, kicked around the hangar where the NTSB people and their helpers are looking at the forlorn bits of wreckage that are coming in.
Didn't the Alaskan airliner have some kind of similar problem.
Well, not according to some on Free Republic... but what happened to Alaska Air 261 is that an adjusting screw (not a little screw like in a window frame, a big screw that works like the one in a heavy-duty jack) that was borderline and maybe not lubricated right got stuck. When that happened, they couldn't adjust "the incidence of the horizontal stabilizer" (for the technically informed) or, for "the rest of us," how much the plane tended to nose up or nose down. They tried a lot of different things to get the plane back under control, including trying to fly it upside down... but they couldn't get control back. In their case the malfunction didn't happen until they were at or near cruise altitude, and then their superhuman efforts did keep the plane flying longer than most pilots probably could have done.
Similar crashes to that include the Southern Air Lockheed Hercules (a civilian C-130) that crashed on takeoff because a control lock was in place, Kelly AFB, October 4, 1986. (An A-300 does not have that type of control lock, but it illustrates how control malfunctions can doom a machine right after takeoff).
Another possibility I didn't mention on my list of cases that can be ruled out is a pitot/static system malfunction. Had that happened on a day like Monday, the crew could simply have used an external horizon reference (that means that if they had a problem with their flight instruments, the weather was nice enough they could just look out the windows and fly the plane by looking at the real horizon). There have been some nsty accidents from pitot/static systems, but all the recent air carrier ones have been at night (and usually in bad weather) and the planes have not broken up before hitting the ground or water -- so those prangs are not like this one.
Of course, every airline crash is kind of unique. Private pilots seldom make new mistakes (there are just new pilots fatally committing the same old mistakes) so we almost have to rely on the airline crashes to develop new safety concepts (ghoulish as that sounds, it's true. Regulations and operations manuals are written in the blood of innocents).
Keep asking questions.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F