Air France

Now that we're finally getting some details about the transmissions, it looks less like a bomb. The first and biggest argument against a bomb was that nobody claimed responsibility, and most air attacks these days are by terrorists. Of course there was an instance some decades back where someone wanted to collect insurance...

If one of the last things to be reported is loss of cabin pressure, that says there almost certainly wasn't a bomb in the cabin, and probably not in the hold either (or the cabin floor would have broken out--unless the Airbus has an exceedingly strong floor). That excludes most of the places passengers have any sort of influence on.

The system failures don't sound like the pilot was Allahu Akhbaring the plane into the drink the way the Egyptian pilot did on 990. But the pilots never made a sound, meaning they were either too busy to talk (for 4 minutes!?), incapacitated, or the radio was dead. Does their radio use a different frequency and antenna than the jet's diagnostic systems? I'd hope so--redundancy is good.

So maybe lightning is the problem after all. An Air Cornet pilot reported a bright (downward?) flash of light that "disappeared in six seconds," which wouldn't be your standard ground burst of lightning. The "downward" may have been an optical illusion, and I'm not sure I believe the "six seconds." A cloud-to-cloud strike that went stem to stern might do some damage, though I'm not sure what kind or where. I'm not sure how many antennas the jet has or where they are--it might be that they'd provide a less resistive path than the skin of the jet and open the way for some internal damage.

A downward slow flash of light sounds like a meteor, but I don't see how it could do that much damage and still not breach the cabin.

On the other hand, the plane broke apart in midair, so something drastic happened. If a jet's controls don't work anymore, will violent winds break something? I wouldn't think so, unless the updraft was sudden and strong enough to break a wing. Unless something else was damaged too...

Knowing no details of the Airbus design beyond the most primitive, I'll hazard a guess that there are two separate antenna systems , and that a longitudinal lightning strike took the radio antenna as a path into the control cable run, which it destroyed. That would explain the lack of radio contact and the large number of simultaneous failures. The explosion from that strike might have weakened some of the structural members the cable run was tied to, and after a few too many updraft flexes a wing broke off.