They were empty - so I'm betting the charts would say they could do it. Hell heavy our charts routinely say FL370 no problem - but it would be a brave person who would actually go there.

To re-hash an old incident, a significant part of the problem was they weren't following any reasonable climb profile, if they held 500fpm, or probably even less, they could probably have got to FL410 with a stable airspeed and lived to tell about it.

Note that the article had a picture of a go! jet (Mesa owned and operated) and did not mention the AMW accident except in the side-bar (and only the insider would know AMW was Mesa owned) and no other mention of Mesa incidents and JO was the only airline executive quoted. So I'm thinking there was a little quid pro quo going on and let's face it, the USA Today (the cartoon of newspapers) isn't exactly known for it's investigative journalism.