david, we haven t talked to you thus far. what are your thoughts on the information that s come out so far? well, anderson, in every investigation i ve ever run, most difficult thick thing is not to jump to the most common and accepted answer right away. there are other things. if you to that, you miss what s right in front of your face. and if you look at that video, the first thing you see is the impact and the explosion. if this were a missile, do you think the aircraft would have come down with no smoke, no trail, nothing at all and simply hit the ground and explode on the ground? i don t think so. there would be evidence of that in the air, and the aircraft would have followed it. you would have been able toel follow that down to that impact point. the evidence is right in front of us. i m very hesitant to jump to the missile idea at this point. david, i want to come back to you on that topic. but president obama is starting to speak. let s listen in. it is wonderful to be b
that s why i drink the champagne of beers. welcome back to our continuing coverage of the malaysian flight crashing with 290 souls on board. no information yet on who was on board the aircraft. obviously, the notification of families is a crucial component of all this. and obviously it s made all the more complicated by the international nature of this flight, a flight which left amsterdam heading for kuala lumpur, a flight which obviously had people connecting from other european capitals, as well. an unknown number of americans on board this flight, as well. still a lot to learn about the human side of this tragedy, which is why we have been focusing so much on the strategic and the military aspect, exactly who brought down this aircraft, if, in fact, it was some sort of a missile fired at the aircraft. chad myers has more information on who else was flying in this
that everybody is talking about, the standard warhead on that missile is set to go off in the proximity of the aircraft, not just strike the aircraft. so doesn t actually hit the aircraft. it s not a kinetic hit. and what it s about 150 pounds of practicing mentation. and so you re saying i don t know what kind of damage that would cause to that aircra aircraft, but would that give that kind of signature you were talking about? well, maybe i could compare that to just an engine that has titanium parts. when that engine comes apart, and let s look at sioux city, for example. when that engine comes apart, you re sending fragmentation, at least that much. but it does impact the aircraft. anywhere on that aircraft, even if it s an impact like you re talking about away from the aircraft and not through the aircraft, it would cause something to make the aircraft go down. unless it was an electro magnetic pulse or something that was caused by it, it would have shut down all the
flight? it was critical to get it, because it told us it confirmed that this catastrophic and horrific eventuality, it told us when it occurred and where it occurred. it did not give us much more information from that, because it was the black box was pretty rudimentary by today s standards. and in this case, i would say the if the plane came apart, and in a dramatic fashion, it may not give us much information. but it will tell us when and where it happened. and the trick would be in the metal, and unfortunately in the condition of the victims. they may show damage from outside missile blast. again, echoing the importance of getting to the site as quickly as possible, being able to recover. absolutely. the those victims and also the parts of the aircraft itself. and anderson, the
hard to imagine anybody surviving something like this. 33,000 feet or so, 32,000 feet, the plane was flying at when it was believed to have been shot out of the sky according to ukrainian officials. at least they say a rocket was fired, missile was fired. that hit the aircraft. questions remain about who fired it, what their intent was, whether it was a mistake, whether they knew it was. a civilian airliner, two ukrainian military airlines have been brought planes have been brought down in previous days, one of them a transport plane. so there s still a lot of questions at this hour. i m here with richard quest, and fareed zakaria, rick franconia. also peter gould, aviation analy analyst, miles o brien. peter, in terms of getting access to the crash site, how important and what sort of a time frame is it crucial that