president macron assured them that france has not forgotten their bravery and the ceremony concluded with a flyover of both french and u.s. military aircra aircraft. the same colors as the united states. joining us now, jim acosta, cnn chief, white house correspondent on the ground with the president. he was there in normandy and in fact he s still there as we can see. we have david gregory and dana bash. jim acosta, you re there on the ground. tell us about this remarkable morning that we watched. reporter: it was a remarkable, striking moment here remembering the heros of d-day 75 years later. as you were just talking about a few moments ago, president trump and emmanuel macron, the president of france, they both gave some very stirring tributes to the men who were gathered here, part of a dwindling number
aircra aircraft. this is the flaperon. that idea is coming from french authorities. mh370 disappeared 17 months ago and was a triple 7 aircraft. the debris arrived yesterday in toulouse. you see it here under police guard. we are covering both of these developments this morning. we ve got erin mcloughlin on reunion island. tell us about that metal object of interest. reporter: good morning, victor. it was found on a beach not far from here, about 11 and a half miles from where they picked up the piece of debris.
at a time and have to be alert every minute of every day. i am sure that they re tired and weather has been cooperating with them. it s been fairly good. they re exhausted, and that s what they signed on for. they re professionals and know how to pass themselves. many experts say that finding the the plane would provide and answer a lot of unanswered questions and maybe even lead us to decide if all planes need to be tracked in a better view? well, it s interesting that we look at that as two different things. it s really not. what happened in finding out, we already know enough to determine that we need to have flight following and flight tracking on aircra aircraft. this was learned four or five
where it breaks apart, those pieces are far from the impact zone. so what my concern was at first was that we might be jumping to a conclusion and as an accident investigator, that s the hardest thing not to do, is to jump to the most obvious conclusion, and the most coincidental conclusion. so when you look at this video, though, you ll miss things that are in front of your face. and by looking at this video, not the one showing now, but the one prior when we showed the actual impact point, you can see there is nothing leading to that impact point. in a missile explosion, and i ve asked spiter marks to confirm this, any aircraft he s seen blown out of the sky by a missile of any point, there is a trial of smoke that leads down to the impact zone. and you don t see that in this video. there is nothing leading down. at first i thought there was, there seemed to be a dark line above it, but that s just vergara coming from the clouds above. so that is not what happened here, in my estimat
what could have happened, you don t need to blow the aircraft out of the sky. for it to fall out of the sky. this missile only had to hit the aircraft. as peter a wing, a tail plane. as peter gould said, when an aircraft is hit like this, it in his words unzips and falls apart. all the fasteners around it start to fall apart. so it s essentially the plane could have come out of the air in one piece. but extremely distressed. because obviously it has been hit by a missile. and what you re seeing there is the fuel explosion. fareed? what this reminds us is of the enormous kind of power of asymmetry and asymmetrical warfare, that you have these weapons systems that even ten years ago you would not have had. that a few people, a handful of people, not particularly well-trained, could take out a commercial airplane, flying at