Reply #158: O.K..........I'll try this again.

[seatnineb]

If the plane hit the ground nose first......

Then how did the fragile cockpit end up in the woods?

In the words of coroner Miller:

It hit... and, um... the front portion, the cockpit, and first class section broke off, and bounced into that area which is...obviously, there's no trees there now, but... the treeline came all the way out. And then the rear two-thirds of the plane just telescoped right into the crater. When I got here, you looked across there and you couldn't even tell that there was a plane there.

...The cockpit bounced, and flew into those, into those trees. And it just... it exploded...an explosion. And everything just, uh... everything just blew into pieces... (strains to pick up debris) ...like this. Lot of these. Now, there were some quite large pieces, of course, that, uh... the biggest piece I think they said was, uh, a section of the fuselage that had four windows. That was the biggest.

http://www.airdisaster.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5977...

(THX to Stickdog for this great find)