I did not assert that they didn't have time to talk at all. The Valuejet pilots only knew they had a large scale raging fire onboard when they asked for the nearest available airport. Before that, they would have thought the airtight cargo compartment would extinguish a flame from O2 starvation. My point was that fires can overtake pilots very quickly, going from seemingly minor to terrifying in seconds.

You misunderstood which time interval I was talking about entirely. I am also not espousing a theory that this is what happened to the MH flight. I just wanted to point out to people what timescale these things operate within.