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It is hard not to imagine it either blew up on its own or was shot down. At 24,000 feet in what looked like calm skies, WX break up seems unlikely. To have the whole wing section be intact, not seeing G loads as a cause. Sad for the pilots and passengers.
Front fuselage & cockpit gone, middle fuselage gone, empennage gone…just a full wing with all four engines & props spinning, main tank fuel pouring out the drain masts, wow. Crazy-unbelievable to have this on video, almost as if someone was looking for it to occur and get the footage. IF it was not an explosion on-board (e.g. a terrorist act or other act of violence), there can be many airframe & fatigue issues on a Herk of this vintage, but almost all of those issues revolve around the center wing box structure weakness. It makes the shocking video footage of what’s coming down much more of a mystery, showing that sort of breakup into thirds or quarters but having that whole 132-1/2 feet of wing attached to a small stretch of spine and spiralling down all by itself.
One famous piece of Herk film footage shows a old firefighting bird have a wing depart while making a low-level run on a fire, which I believe occurred in the early 1990’s. More recently a USMC KC-130T (late 1980’s-built, H2-model equivalent) suffered a propeller blade shank failure that caused a cascading & catastrophic aircraft breakup over Mississippi at about the same mid-20’s FL altitude, level cruise.
As a former Herk driver, it sure makes me sad