They keep calling it an oil slick. Those engines don't need that much oil that it would cover a 6+ mile swath of ocean as reported. Most likely it's jet fuel.
If it is jet fuel. The plane came down in big pieces I would think, because an explosive large enough to disentegrate the airplane in flight probably would have resulted in most of the fuel burning up I would imagine.
They are going to start finding bits of her soon. Insulation. Plastics. Luggage. Debris. Possibly folks in rafts if lucky. That stuff floats. And Boeing can look at most small debris and determine if it's a 777 part.
Whatever it was probably happened fast. Think of the Alaska flight that had the elevator jack screw issue off the California coast. Those guys even had time to transmit their situation. And they were in a steep dive.
Double engine failure would have killed electrics. But they would have had RATs to generate power. In that scenario, would the RATs generate sufficient power to broadcast mayday over long distances? Perhaps they were calling and nobody heard them.
Catastrophic structural failure due to metal fatigue associated with pressurization issues
Volcanic ash
Terrorism
Flight control malfunction or failure
Lots of possibilities on the chalk board, now begins the long task of ruling them out one by one and determining the cause of the accident.
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