There are reports that witnesses on the ground heard one or more explosions before the plane began to descend. An object in freefall from the plane’s cruising height of 28,000ft would take at least 40 seconds to reach the ground. The Embraer, which still had one wing intact, seems to have fallen much more slowly than that; flight-tracking data put its final speed of descent at 8,000ft/minute, so it would have taken several minutes to fall from cruising height: plenty of time for someone alerted by the noise to get their phone out.
Incidentally, flight tracking data from FlightRadar24 apparently showed that:
the plane … began leveling off at 28,000 feet … then continued at a consistent speed for several minutes before its vertical rate began to decrease “dramatically,” … In its final minutes, the aircraft also made variable climbs and descents in its flight, and at one point climbed above 30,000 feet before descending again …
(quote is from this Newsweek article). Apparent anomalies in radar data often go away when analyzed more closely, but if this is correct, you have to wonder what was going on up there. A 2000ft climb seems an unlikely response to an onboard explosion that severed part of the wing, but it could be consistent with attempts to evade a missile or a hostile aircraft. Could the justifiably-paranoid Prigozhin have had his private jet fitted with a military-style missile approach warning (MAW) system that alerted his pilot of an incoming missile?
