DJ77 AMG65 and AMF
But AMF's description should be supported by references to theoretical or experimental studies or even personal experience (if any). Otherwise, it looks like fiction.
See, for example, Tim Vasquez's analysis: no updraft higher than 40kt (about 4000 ft/mn), not "18000 ft/min, even higher" as mentioned, and no heat sink signature observed.
Of course, I don't intend to suggest that the pilots were not faced with a very severe situation flying in (or close to) bad weather without reliable airspeed indication.
I've already posted on this and the previous thread the basics of high altitude aerodynamics, and given the approximated weight of that aircraft at 35,000' others have referenced the buffet margins and turb air penetration speed they'd be dealing with. My question to you would be have you ever actually hand-flown a jet aircraft near the upper limit of it's performance envolope in smooth, still air, let alone with moderate or higher turbulence? Your answer makes me doubt that very much.
And if you're downplaying an aircraft traveling transitioning laterally through even 4,000 fpm gust cores while near it's maximum altitude then it only confirms my previous suspision as to your experience.
Personal experiences? Sure. I learned to fly and spent the first almost 20 years of my career operatiing near and through what's considered the worst severe weather area on the planet, the mid-continental U.S. That experience includes 2 spring/summer season of Weather Modification, primarily hail supression where we didn't even take off to play chicken with them unless the CBs were at least Level 5s.
Experimental studies? As an offshoot of this program, we also (in the early/mid 80s, contracted by the governement) also had the displeasure of doing some of the early airborne-gathered data flights in the infancy of microburst reasearch by flying specially sensor-equipped aircraft for the explicit purpose of finding out what was going on inside a convective storm in order to correlate it with what ground and airborne-based radar sees. Microburst hunting, if you will. I will tell you this; for that program we did NOT enter those Level 5 or higher cells, nor did we enter ANY cells (or transition directly above developing cells)
while at high altitude near the upper edge of our envelope. There's a world of difference encountering such forces at mid and lower altitudes (at the least extremely uncomfortable to quite possibly perilous) compared to high altitude (always an extremely perilous seat-pincher).
There's also a reason the CB penetration flights used to gather data on the probablilities of encountering differing degrees of light-to-extreme turbulence and hail diameters within CBs when they were working to devise the descriptive sytem of Levels based on reflectivity we still use today were accomplished in aircraft like F-106s.
Nothing has changed in that regard over the last 40 years in civil aviation no matter how efficient aircraft have become. They aren't designed for it. I've certainly flown with some nowadays, however, that don't know how the contours they see on their airborne wx radar correlate to CB levels, or worse, what the dbz levels of reflectivity are actually describing as it concerns the pilot; the varying degrees of probability of encountering low/light upwards to high/extreme turbulence, and low/small diameter to high/large diameter hail. BUT, as any pilot who's operated x-band radar knows, there are some prounounced limitations to getting the full picture.
Back then in the 80's maybe the accident lessons they had learned when transitioning to jets in the 60's and the unforgiving nature of high-altitude flying were still recent enough to drum into us and people took heed. Everything in my flying experience after that confirmed what I'd been taught, and my experience isn't limited to simply tooling along in level flight, on A/P, twisting a heading bug now and then to half-bank around the occasional cell. It's no "Hollywood" fantasy to know that convective weather and high altitude flying don't mix. From what I'm reading here though, I'm beginning to believe that a lot of those lessons have been forgotten, or downplayed over time.
Tim Vasquez has done an exceedingly great bit of research, but no matter how great your pictures or theories are, they are too macro and dependent on reflectivity levels and satellite imaging to truly see the full picture of the micro-level (meaning laterally small), severe dynamics contained in CB cells that can wreak havoc on an aircraft. When I was younger and braver, I helped collect data on just that in search of microbursts and their nature and as an offshoot CBs in gereral, directly experiencing how CBs can affect an aircraft in flight (with various air data recorders running for delivery to the much smarter folks than we)..not simply postulated what might happen based on sattelite imagery.