[mlyle]

> A typical passenger jet flies at a speed of somewhere between 100m/s and 300m/s. Just a small downward angle can add a vertical component to that vector well above 9.81m/s. That's what I think we're seeing here, not a plane dropping out of the sky.

Don't pick on the commenter's unit mistake. The source material says "the aircraft would have dropped 1425 feet in 12 seconds maximum which requires about free fall acceleration" -- this is a 36 m/s descent; it started from a climb, and then ended in returning to 0 m/s at the minimum altitude. It's 2/3rds of a g acceleration downwards, minimum, if the data is valid.