To my delight I found a time line of articles. I had a lot of information to sort through, the topic about damaged parts found in the ocean from the airplane and what those parts can tell us stuck out in my head. I found my article and it fueled my interest of the topic. .

             The article, "Experts differ on what damage to Flight 261 jackscrew may mean" by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, relates the importance of a piece of wreckage that may have been clearly damaged before impact. The piece is called the jackscrew assembly, which controls the angle of the stabilizer, the horizontal part of the tail. Gene Daub, a senior air-crash investigator with the Federal Aviation Administration"s Transportation Safety Institute in Oklahoma City, states that there are three pieces of evidence, which suggest damage prior to the crash. The stabilizer was jammed in the full nose down position before the crash, threads appear to have striped spirally on the jackshaft, possibly the automatic shutoff failed to work when in complete nose down position, and possibly dirt in the shaft caused it not to operate smoothly. ("Experts differ," par. 7) A retired pilot, Barry Schiff is 80 % sure the damaged occurred prior to the crash, but is still unsure. ("Experts differ," par. 11).

             None of these facts are positive because of the disagreement among investigators and the incompletion of the tests. The theories behind why the jackscrew was damaged before the crash are good ones, but how could it have been damaged during the crash? The damaged evidence is too perfect. It seems to me that the answer wouldn"t come that easy. It is my opinion that any four of the damage possibilities could have happened while the airplane was tumbling towards the ground or on impact. There must have been a problem prior to the crash. In my experience reading about airline crashes, I would be interested more if the author had included facts about how the jackscrew could have been damaged during the crash itself.