"But we're not obviously missing anything mundane or somehow thinking very unclearly in lockstep?"

"Not to me.  Point out the actual indicator lights you see as red so I can check your direct sensory perceptions."

A couple of minutes later, she sends out the Blue Steward with instructions.

A few minutes after that, once the Blue Steward's had time to pass it on the flight crew, she hits the planewide announcement button.

"Attention.  Attention.  This is the Flight Captain speaking."

"Exception in progress.  Not immediately fatal.  Tick 20."

"Thaaat's not a good sign about the causes of the mysterious Network failure," Keltham says, but quietly, because a lot of other people are probably saying the same thing and sudden noise-babble is not helpful during in-flight emergencies.

"We have simultaneously lost all satellite-based comms on frequencies 1.5GHz for global positioning, 3.5GHz transponder lock, Network uplink 70GHz.  That covers systems located at front and rear of plane.  Local diagnostics show equipment claims to be functioning but is reading only silence.  Failover shortwave on 14.3MHz shows green internal diagnostics but complete silence including of background ticks.  We weren't prior-warned of any expected solar weather which could do that.  Observation out the window confirms that we are not in a thunderstorm, no thunderstorms predicted nearby.  Radio noise from that or a solar flare would be directly audible on the simplified shortwave design.  Flight crew member Blue Steward has personally confirmed our direct sensory experiences on this."

"Standard protocol doesn't cover this exact situation.  Following general category protocol we will turn in 27 minutes and follow an alternate emergency flightpath to a coastal airfield where we can safely land without any functioning comms.  Default plan to meliorize against:  We are waiting 15 minutes to try to let any comms-equipment-destroying phenomena subside, then turning on the secondary shortwave to see if we can transmit between our backup shortwave and primary shortwave to confirm whether both radios are working and the apparent radio silence is probably real."

"Green Steward is trained in running emergency local prediction markets in case of comms failure.  Please don't set up new central markets unless you think you've got something important.  If you've got high-reliability direct-relevant information or what you're pretty sure is a critical insight, stake 100 unskilled-labor-hours against minimum bounty 10000 $ULH to pass to a crew member.  If there is a Keeper on board or a socially acknowledged supergenius or technical genius, please identify yourself to the crew."

"Okay," Thellim says quietly to her seatmate, everyone at this point is speaking very quietly, "I'm going to say it out loud, so I'm not just thinking it over and over, that really sounds like our plane just got isekaied."

"One hundred to one against up to my current life savings," Keltham says instantly.

"No bet.  Did I miss a mundane explanation?"

"Literally anything is more mundane than that.  Aliens are more mundane than that."

"Aliens take out our plane, too.  They saturation thermonuclear-bomb the entire planet, which produces a lot of radio noise even if they don't care enough to particularly target our plane."

"Aliens with Conveniently Outcome-Specific Overcomplicated Exotic Motives are more mundane than our plane suddenly appearing on another planet over an identical cloudbank."

"Who says identical?  I wasn't looking out the window, and might not have remarked on a sudden change of cloud luminosity if I had been."

"This does not, in my own opinion, repair the primary problem with your theory."

"Your next line will be... 'Of course in real life it's not conceptualmagic, it's not aliens, it's not even a giant criminal conspiracy, there is some completely mundane explanation we're all just failing to think of.'"

"Why yes, that is my next line.  However did you know?"

"It's what everyone always says in these stories right after something magical happens to them unless the author has skipped over that part on account of it being too repetitive on a metaliterary level and I know I ought to ignore that but I am just having a really, really hard time seeing past that point."

"I gently accuse you of jumping the start-bell on recognizing us as having a state of confusion that appears more in fictional characters than in previous real history.  If we'd seen something for which there was an obvious positive certainty of lack of possible mundane explanation, that's one thing.  In this case we have only the negative absence of a found-explanation; and the cumulative-search that's failed to turn up a mundane explanation sounds like it was maybe 5 minutes for flight-crew."

"I'd say, plus 1 minute for passengers, except that we wouldn't know if some passenger had found an explanation and were in the process of referring it upward."

"Slightly persuasive.  I just worry that if this kind of simultaneous comms failure had any mundane explanation in the sense of being prior-predicted by any imaginable state of reality considered previously probable, that prediction would appear in the flight handbook, and the crew wouldn't be telling us it was a mystery."

"So 5 minutes for the crew, 1 minute for us, and a couple of dozen expert-years before this plane ever took off."

"Slightly valid.  We get to look at our exact observations and the ground planners have to consider all the possibilities.  I agree your argument implies that whatever happened, it's not some simple cause that happens all the time and that we're just failing to think of.  Could be some complicated weird failure which was nonetheless mundane, and would be obvious if we had all the plane designers and engineers on board."

"Your postulating that a high-probability explanation exists without saying what it is, is not itself a high-probability explanation."

"Well, would you like to bet in full generality about whether our present experiences turn out to have a high-probability explanation or a low-probability explanation?"

"Low-probability, as in something that seemed less than 0.01% likely before the plane took off?"

(It's an obvious joke so Keltham doesn't get upset at the proposed unfair bet; if it was 1 in 10,000 it'd have happened already to some plane flight, and would be in the handbook.)

"Low-probability as in non-mundane, or it expands our view of the mundane.  Changes which sort of things we think can happen to us going forward.  Isekai would count, aliens would count, some weird side effect of a solar flare would not count."