indonesia president is asking for patience from the families of those aboard the plane. translator: we will do all it takes to find the missing airplane and we hope that families of victims will be patient and pray that this search will have a conclusion. reporter: 5:36 a.m. the airbus a-320 took off from the indonesian city of surabaya on sunday morning. it was bound for singapore, a flight that usually takes a little over two hours. 6:12 about 45 minutes into the flight indonesian officials said one of the pilots asked air traffic control permission to turn and climb to a higher altitude to try to avoid bad weather. air traffic control approved the pilot s request to turn left but denied permission for the plane to climb to 38,000 feet from 32,000 feet. 6:18 six minutes later, the plane disappeared from radar. another six minutes later, 6:24 a.m. air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft. there was no distress call.
here. when you say, should we have canceled the flight? no the thunderstorms hadn t even developed yet. now 30 minutes before the plane disappears now these storms are getting very big, getting violent and now this pilot has to fly through a fence of weather that s going up rather rapidly. so when he talked about weather being a liveing breathing thing, it definitely is. the storms were 50,000 feet tall. with violent weather like that you can affect the laminar flow over a wing. the wind takes a plane and lifts it into the air. it s the lift that if you lose that it s called the stall in an airplane. and that stall is what possibly happened especially if that air speed was correct. let me take you back here this is a satellite picture live all the way up to right now. we re going to back you up again. all of a sudden you ll see these storms here, they weren t there an hour ago. they have just popped up.
they re going to have act quickly as soon as they spot something and follow the leads to get the optimum results in the case. and the hour each hour so critical. the plane disappeared from all radar, 25 hours. looking at the weather, the weather pattern that we saw, and that is significantly improved since the plane disappeared, somehow that going to affect signals, any signals from the plane? yeah and again, there s so much that we still don t know but, you know most in terms of signals, most of that most of that works in terms of instrumentation, and again, we make the parallels to airfrance flight 447, and the impact could have been particularly on what the pilots were seeing. when we look at that crowd we see that the pilots didn t realize what was happening, they, you know thought they were timing they were not. so really that s going to be
so in this case the fact that the plane went down so quickly or whatever happened to it happened so quickly that we should have all the voice communication that the pilot and co-pilot had with each other, as well as radioed back to the air traffic controllers that they may not have received. so you ll hear everything that was going on in terms of what they were trying to deal with. then the data recorder which records over the whole flight, will be saying everything the airplane was doing, speed, altitude all of the information of the flight itself. but the cockpit voice recording is going to be very very important in this case. yeah. and the search for that continues. david gallow if you can talk about the timing here. there were mistakes made when we were talking about the march flight of mh-370. it really hurt the overall search. how key was the piece of debris that was found early on in the air france flight that went down flight 447 over the atlantic how key was it to
indeed i believe this is what the flight was attempting to do. you know the one of the problems that there is at this time of the year these storms can be quite numerous and often packed tightly together. the other issue is that these storms can occasionally get a very, very large and powerful cell. it s possible we don t know yet if this is the case but it is possible that this aircraft managed to fly through one of these cells. you know we have to wait to see what develops. perhaps we ll get the black boxes and find out. but it isn t particularly you know different from other intertropical convergence zones. tell us when you re flying through a storm, especially at night, obviously you can t see