Payne's plane slowly lost it's pressurization, the pilot(s) passed out, and it flew on auto pilot until it ran out of gas and crashed. There were F16's that intercepted it to see what was going on. The reported fog on the inside of the windows, which indicated loss of pressurization.
Jake, depending on how heavy/light the airplane was, it could climb at 1-2,000 feet per minute from 350 to 450. So maybe 5 minutes. But much less if you 'zoomed' it up there by pulling back harder, but you'll bleed off airspeed if you do that, and you won't stay up there long before you run out of airspeed and come right back down, which might be why they dove down to 230.
Hmmm...that would be an interesting clue if it is true. I'm still not sure I buy the hijacking theory from the altitude changes - 5 Minutes is a really long fight in a cabin (allowing time for some folks to certainly join in). That could still be a single event that left the plane in a sharpish nose up attitude when it stalled at that crazy altitude and pitched back down...but it probably wouldn't have traveled too far if that were the case. Too high for a bird strike, weather too good for hail. Cracked windshield(s) nobody noticed? ... I guess the Aliens still have this one for now.
And I still stand by my first topic...if the engines are globally capable of continuously broadcasting performance data to Rolls Royce every few minutes, why in the world can't the plane send some similar but specific location data? Granted, I have the benefit of hindsight, but this seems like a really big engineering duh-huh.
