I want to see the maintenance logs on this puppy. If the bolts were over-torqued, or if they were taken out and then re-used, or if they were counterfeit, then the body of the bolt will stand in the threaded hole, and the head will snap off. I feel that the upshot of this, if we get the whole truth ( alright, quit laughing so hard ) is that the maintenance facility is at fault, thereby placing this squarely on AMR's shoulders.
If I had any AMR stock, I'd have it sold forthwith.
First off, I build airplanes for Boeing. They are not bolts per say, but hilocks or hilites with collars, and yes the collars could be loosened a little bit, but I doubt that that would cause the tail section and both engines to fall off in such a short flight.
Second, the tail section seems to have fallen off first ahead of any other parts, this would lead me to believe 2 things, a. the flight would have continued on the path that it previously had taken (going up, not down) and b. the amount of time it would have taken to loosen that many bolts in that small of space and in that short of time would be impossible. (Try putting together a tail section of an airplane, there is barely room for one much less 2 or more people even on a jumbo jet.) And it takes a lot of time to loosen or tighten that many collars even with Pneumatic equipment and you would have to have all of the proper equipment at that. This would mean various Knar and the like guns for the location and difficulty and length of the collars.
That said, I wondered about something much simpler and faster, acid on the skins themselves. Other than that or a bomb, missle, etc, I simply can not see pure mechanical failure without some very, very, very, very, lacks maintenence, and AA is not known for that.