All you armchair pilots are so wrong about this.
I have it from an realiable source from a friend of a friend of a cousin who is related to an Air Force ROTC member enrolled at CUNY, who heard it from his girlfriend who heard it from her father who has a friend that waxes floors in the Pentagon that the story in the media is incorrect and a complete fabrication.
Here's the *REAL* story...
While in flight, the plane was caught in a UFO tractor beam, and transported off course while they (the aliens) were performing the abduction of passengers, five at a time, and performing alien experiments on them. Of course this all happened in a time warp, so the exact time that the plane was not in contact was 1 hour and 18 minutes. The all knowing government however, knew of this and planted a cover story about the pilots looking at their laptops, out of fear of scaring the bejesus out of the US population.
A similar incident happened this week in Norway, perhaps you've heard about it. The swirl in the sky that was purported to be a Russian missle experiment gone awry. This is simply not true, as another aircraft abducted in mid-flight, and unfortunately all on-board were killed due to a 10 yr old Finnish hacker who had hacked into the alien crafts computer systems. The hacking caused an apparent malfunction in the alien space craft and destroyed it and the airliner. None of this has been reported in mainstream media however, for fear of upsetting the entire world population, and ruining the Christmas spirit.
The same thing sort of happened with the missing Nixon tapes, that 18 minute gap in the tapes was due to aliens again, beaming Nixon and others out of the Oval Office in the name of alien science.