Originally Posted by
tusphotog
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)
Flightaware is probably incorrect there. They can drop the plane quick, but not that quick. It's not an uncontrolled dive like people on the news are making it out to be. Throw the spoilers up and down you go. Probably took 3 min to get under 15,000 feet.
People were texting I'm sure after the plane got down low. It's easier to get a cell signal at 11,000 than 30,000 feet.
It appears at 6:59 Flightaware incorrectly added 5520 feet instead of subtracting it. Correcting that error it would be a smoother slower descent.
6:58pm FL 30,700 +780
6:59pm FL 25,180 -5,520
7:00pm FL 19,700 -5,480
7:01pm FL 14,600 -4320
And I doubt anyone could lock on any cell tower at a ground speed of 348 mph... by the time your phone starts negotiating you've probably gone out of range AND passed the many more towers. A text could be composed, qued and sent when on the ground.