Long read, but really interesting. A lot of interesting evidence.

Added: Clive Irving's Daily Beast hit piece was also interesting but not as much. Consider this pair of paragraphs:

Langewiesche, suggesting the opposite, adds his own dramatic color by saying “The airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.”

That idea is absolutely confounded by the solidity of the pieces of debris that survived. The main and heaviest parts of the jet, the engines and the fuselage, would have been shattered on impact, but never shredded like confetti. Confetti better describes Langewiesche’s detective work.

Clearly the airplane disintegrated into little pieces. Probably many hard bits like the engines did not so much, but the wings definitely did, and the wings and the fuselage are similarly constructed and so the fuselage probably broke up. Most of the parts probably just sank, and many were unidentifiable anyway, like backpacks etc. But having bits of the wings float to West Africa proves the aircraft disintegrated like confetti.