Originally Posted by rickair7777

Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

[...8<...] How about this...someone in the cockpit could survive in the high flight levels ONLY if he used the appropriate setting on the oxygen mask, and used it properly. But any little mistake in that and the perpetrator would find himself disabled before he knew what hit him. Also...if he flew above the 30's the mask would NOT protect him from the bends unless he had pre-breathed pure O2 long enough to purge all the N2 from his body. He wouldn't have had time to to do that, even if he knew he needed to. Perhaps the perpetrator inadvertently took himself out along with the pax during that altitude excursion, and then the plane flew on AP following whatever route the perp had programmed until it ran out of gas.