Air France Flight 447 - Vertical Stabilizer.

I'm looking at the Reuters photo in this article at the Daily Mail and thinking it looks like a very cleanly sheared off vertical stabilizer, the part I wondered about in the post below this one. If this came off, it's possible it could have caused a breach in the pressurized section of the fuselage, which is one of the error messages sent by the plane's on-board diagnostics. A commenter at the Wall Street Journal also mentioned that the first error message received was a notification that the rudder had reached a travel limit, i.e., it was against the stops. That is what caused the failure of the vertical stabilizer on AA587.

Air France A330 Goes Missing Off Brazil

An Air France Airbus A330 jet en-route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 aboard has gone missing somewhere off the coast of Brazil. The aircraft has not been located yet but the first thing that occurred to me when I heard the circumstances under which it went missing (heavy turbulence, thunderstorms) was to wonder if there was a vertical stabilizer separation. That's what brought down American Airlines flight 587 , an Airbus A300 on departure from JFK a scant couple of months after 9-11. This was followed in early 2005 by an Airbus A310 en-route from Havana to Quebec City losing its rudder. Fortunately the crew was able to return to the airport and land that aircraft safely.

It's obviously too early to say what happened here. At this point it could be anything, so to start positing probable causes is complete speculation. It just makes me wonder.

Our prayers should be with the passengers, crew and their families.