airlines flight 370 sparking new calls to improve air security by making it impossible to shut off a jet s key safety system. suggestions include better protection of the voice and data recorders, making it practically impossible for anyone to cut power to these devices in mid-air, and possible expansion of real-time satellite tracking of practically all airliners. john, great to see you. let s break it down with the four systems that you did in your article. these are the systems that could be tampered with. start with the acars. what is it and how can it be tempered with? the acars system is likened to twitter for airplanes, occasionally sending periodic status updates from the airplane, that can even in some cases include the position of the aircraft. if a various system is changed on the airplane, if something
very rare. i think it s a great idea. we know in other instances it may have prevented this from happening. whether it actually caused the crash if you identify a safety risk, but it prevents the next crash. even if the pilot is innocent, down the road this may pay safety dividends. with the safety debates. when we talk about the cockpit, does that include the space below, for example, where the acars system is located? actually no. the cockpit is considered just to be the area that is above the deck. the engineering and electronics department where people pull up the lower 41 so-called because the nose section and the manufacturing is the 41 section.
almost before the plane took off by malaysia air s decision, not to buy an app for their acars system. the aircraft was sold by boeing to malaysia air with a basic avionics suite that don t provide the upgrade that would have provided the same kind of information air france provided that would allow the investigators to within a week to at least know the area of the debris field they re looking for. the thought that a jumbo jet that would allowed this stream of information. so all those pings that we heard, we would have had a load of information, even if acars had gone down that would help us. that s number one. but number two, this is how not to conduct an investigation. let s talk a little bit about
my humble opinion, if they are asking for help, we should provide it in spades. michael, you know better than anyone, the f acaa and similar organizations look for lessons from situations like this. right. what lessons should we be learning right now? just to go back to what michael said, quite frankly we re putting the best resources in the world at a point in the investigation where we have very little hope of seeing any debris. let s go back to one lesson. remember when you talked about telemetry in the acars system. malaysia air decided not to buy the app. about $10 a flight? probably $100,000 per plane in the fleet, swift, it was called. regardless of the acars, it would have provided essential information, the same thing that air france used to find that search and at least understand where that was. so lessons learned?
and the scenario still does have probability of having a terrorist beginning but an accident ending, i.e., something like we saw on united 93 where you start off as a terrorist plot, there s just too many pieces of evidence that point towards intentional event, i.e., the diversion of the airplane precisely at the sea between air traffic control in vietnam and malaysia, the transponders being disabled and the acars system. if you look at the flight path, it actually not only cuts exactly at that moment but precisely along the border between thailand and malaysia itself. the two paths analyzed now, one at 4 knot path, one 50, the 4-knot is preferred but it turns and goes back toward australia. there are a number of u.s. bases and other bases in northern australia that could be a potential target for terrorism. gotcha. and, ken, my last question to you, and that is let s pretend