I seem to recall the investigation coming to the conclusion that the rudder went full left or right causing one wings lift to increase while the other's lift dropped dramatically. The result was the inversion, loss of pilot control and the eventual auger. All on board were lost. It happened on land next to a house a good friend of mine owned.
It was a really grim sight.
When the plane went down I climbed onto my roof and could see the plume of smoke.
There have been a few similar incidents, one with an Alaskan Airways jetliner and one in...ummmm...SE Asia(?) or maybe Europe. All were attributed to the degrading of the V Stabilzer mounts or gears, so apparently accidents like this do happen.
However with regard to the plane over Queens and Flight 800, I have my Tin Foil Hat firmly in place and am calling terrorist activity.
I'm proud to be a right Wing Nut!
prisoner6
The Boeing 737 has had many accidents that could only be partially explained as an engineering type design problem. I think a 737 crashed in the Denver, Colorado area a few years back, maybe as far back as 10 years ago that was also attributed to some type of rudder control type of inversion factor. Boeing has tried many fixes to correct noted problem, but is still not 100% convinced of what true problem is, although flight data extracted from the various accidents indicated that problem was caused by a closely related type of problem.
Boeing modified the Rudder system after the Denver Accident, and I don't believe that I've heard of any further 737 accidents related to a accident with this type of crash incident data, so maybe this problem was finally fixed. The Boeing 737 is a heavily used aircraft with relatively few accidents over its total airframe history.