The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrible storm.
How the airplane got into this storm, and what exactly happened once it got there, are two fascinating if perhaps unanswerable questions. The plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — the proverbial black boxes — are apparently lodged amid undersea mountains, beneath thousands of feet of water. They may stay there forever.
And so we are left to speculate — as to how an experienced crew, at the controls of a $100 million jetliner, could have found itself in such deadly circumstances.