Re: Basement Dweller Butthurt.

Correct, what they found was a very badly damaged flight data recorder with the storage medium (the solid state drives or whatever) missing.
This will make investigator's life a lot harder, but (if I'm not misunderstanding an F-35 maintainer I've spoken with) the F-35A's black box is apparently stored in the base of the left vertical stabiliser (presumably in the avionics bay back there, near the rear-lower MADL arrays), so the fact that it's basically been destroyed would suggest that this might have been a rather high speed crash.
This will make investigator's life a lot harder, but (if I'm not misunderstanding an F-35 maintainer I've spoken with) the F-35A's black box is apparently stored in the base of the left vertical stabiliser (presumably in the avionics bay back there, near the rear-lower MADL arrays), so the fact that it's basically been destroyed would suggest that this might have been a rather high speed crash.