crashes, so i was fairly confident it might be that. david, can you explain the location where this piece of debris was found and how peculiar or expected that is? hi alyson. it is very expected for something floating in the southernmost part of the indian ocean, especially off the west coast of australia far enough out. everything there circulates in a counterclockwise manner. and the distance is not that great when you think that it s been in the water for 500 days. so with the winds and the currents that are pushing it it could have made it there easily. the question is where exactly did it come from? and how much can it tell us about where x marks the spot where malaysian air 370 if it is in fact and i m still reserving judgment if it is a piece of mh370. where did it impact the water. if it does turn out to be from a 777, then are you still
these crashes are extremely rare and air travel has never been safer and as you point out, it is safer to fly than it is to drive to the airport. well the speculation game is always distressing but it is understandable why people want it is never helpful. taking you back to malaysia air 370, that was not how to run an investigation, and we heard the jet went up and down and turned course and we still don t know other than it took off and made a turn and we still know nothing about it. and the speculation is something experts try to avoid and certainly those in the french ntsb and the faa. they will report facts as they have them and when they can come out with something tangible. and we re talking about the french alps one of the most beautiful places in the world and also one of the most rugged and remote mountains in the
but the ones that are the tallest have the anvils. whatever direction that anvil is pointing tells you the direction the storm is moving. appreciate that. still a lot we do not know about this. back with richard quest, david gallo, director of special projects at the woods hole. he led the search for france air. and miles o brien. you know when you look at the radar and you see the conditions that this plane flew through, and we know that there were other planes in the area at the time but this was at the lowest altitude lowest altitude. it s also interesting to me given the shallowness of this water, there was a crash back in 2007 in this part of the world. it took i think 10 to 11 days for them to actually find locate pieces of that aircraft. it s a big body of water. it may not be deep but you know roughly where the plane is but you ve then got to work out which part of the how it came
hail hitting an aircraft at that size what that can do to an aircraft. it can blow out the windshield. you can destroy the radar system of the nose cone. there s all kinds of problems it could cause if you ran into hail. believe it or not, if there s enough moisture in the air, you can actually cause the engines to flame out. so being inside one of these storms is not a good place to be. and to add on to what miles was saying what you re talking about, besides the physical hail ice, rain is these tremendous movements of air currents these up drafts and downdrafts and what they re doing, of course is completely and utterly disturbing the vital air flow over the wing at the same time creating tremendous movements of the aircraft within it. and that s where you get your stall from because the aircraft no longer has the necessary smooth air going over it whilst