There is a lot of strange stuff going on. News media get to broadcast their strange ideas to tens of millions. Patrick Smith, career professional pilot and career professional author and columnist wrote, "Ice. According to the early speculation, ice was the likely culprit."

I don't believe it was ice, because there is such a long history of airplanes designed to fly through ice, and they had done that so many times, through so many different kinds of icing conditions, without crashing except in extremely rare cases that were largely blamed on pilot error, incorrect training, the special case of bad design of the ATR, and so forth, that I think it's very strange to think that ice suddenly is capable of bringing down airliners all by itself.