I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.
1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash
2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)
3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.
4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.
I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.
Depressurization also circumstantially connects with the otherwise unexplained climb to 40,000 feet, and with the disconnection and reconnection of the electrical system.
I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.
Shutting down most/all of the electrical systems on the plane suggests depressurization. Also it just makes sense to do so; a plane full of dead people can't engage in heroics to save the day. And he might have seen it as the humane thing to do, rather than leave people in fear for hours up to the actual crash.
But agreed that there's no hard evidence for this, or even for much of the entire story. Just a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests a lot.
