Leightman 957:
Since no one knows what happened to this airplane yet, I can't see how anyone could say "I could do better than that" since we don't know what THAT even is yet other than the generic stay away from thunderstorms advice.
Propduffer: I was a right seat eyewitness to a plane about to be lost due to convective activity. The left seat PIC/student* was VERY willing to rip the plane up trying not to gain altitude and then managed to get a spiral dive going
I had to take over to bail us out of the situation. Wings level, Va, and "unable to maintain altitude due to convective activity, we'll tell you when we level off" did the trick. 2,000 FPM + at idle power is a ride
Until you get into ice or lack of O2 or mach limits or something
* The student was already comm/ir rated, not a n00b I would expect to do something like that.