The Legacy came streaking at the Boeing about 30 feet to the left of the fuselage and 2 feet lower. The displacement was infinitesimal on the scale of the sky, and a measure of impressive navigational precision. The Legacy’s winglet acted like a vertically held knife, slicing through the Boeing’s left wing about halfway out and severing the wing’s internal spar. The outboard section of the wing whipped upward, stripping skin as it went, then separated entirely, spiraling over the fuselage and demolishing much of the Boeing’s tail. In the Boeing’s cockpit the sequence sounded like a car crash. Instantly the Boeing twisted out of control, corkscrewing violently to the left and pitching straight down into a rotating vertical dive. The cockpit filled with alarms—an urgent klaxon and a robotic voice insistently warning, Bank angle! Bank angle! Bank angle!, as if the crew might need the advice. Back in the cabin the passengers screamed and shouted. The pilots reacted as one might expect, fighting desperately to regain control. They probably did not know what had gone wrong. They certainly never mentioned it. What is unusual is that they also did not swear. Ten seconds into the dive, one of them did cry “Aye!,” but the other urged him to stay calm. “Calma!” he said, and seconds later he said it again. If pilots must die in an airplane, all would choose to finish so well. Of course these two knew they were gone, but they did what they could, even extending the landing gear to slow the dive. The gesture was hopeless. Twenty-two seconds into the plunge the airplane’s over-speed warning came on with a rattle that continued to the end. Forces inside the airplane rapidly grew until, 30 seconds into the dive, they exceeded four Gs—the gravity-load threshold beyond which some passengers must have begun to black out as the forces drained blood from their minds. Maybe they were the lucky ones or maybe it didn’t matter. In the cockpit the pilots kept trying to fly, struggling with the controls and exchanging a few words which are impossible to discern over the bedlam of alarms. Forty-five seconds into the dive came another “Aye!” Seven seconds later, at 7,000 feet, the Boeing broke into three parts, which plummeted in formation into the forest below.
I only had time to skim through it, listen to the post-impact audio on the two feeds, and bookmark it for later.