consultant. also, david is the author of why planes crash. the fight for safe skies and a cnn analyst so thanks to all of you. mark weiss, what do you glean from this new information? i think you have to start managing expectations. we ve heard so many conflicting reports over the last number. days. i think this information needs to be vetted. certainly if it is real and legitimate, it brings up a whole new set of circumstances. but as was brought up in the last hour, the descent to 12,000 feet, if it depends on how rapid that was. and also, did it climb back to another altitude? it certainly at this point could have said a number of things. there could have been somebody in the cockpit. we still don t know. that forced the pilots to descend because they wanted to turn the aircraft around. without question, this could have been a procedure that would have come about because of some type of catastrophe on board the
corridor where the low altitude may have helped avoid other traffic. earlier today malaysian authorities suggested the sharp left turn was not preprogrammed. right now a growing fleet of planes are in the sky scouring the indian ocean for any physical signs of malaysia flight 370. ten search planes including some from china and japan will make the journey today from perth, australia to the remote turbulent waters. official just announced the search has resumed. i see you have a guest there. the question is, does that mean that airplanes are now on site at this search area? not quite yet but they are heading that way. there are a total of six planes in the air. and joining me here, jeffrey thomas with airlines ratings.com. a local aviation experts. let s talk about today s search. why is today so critical? it is really critical.
detail. it is a small amount of detail but significant, don. in this investigation into what happened on board flight 370 shortly before it disappeared off the radar and disappeared for the past two weeks. day 17 here as the sun rises in kuala lumpur since the plane took off. let me tell but the detail we have from this source close to the investigation. what we understand is some time between 1:19 and 2:40 a.m., a military radar believes that the plane not only made a turn but it dropped to 12,000 feet. that s around 4,000 meters. the turn it took around two minutes on a 777 to make. that could be anything from 90 to 180 degrees. a complete u-turn effectively. but crucially, the new piece of information we ve learned about the dropping of altitude to 12,000 feet open up a lot of possibilities, and clarifies the picture for us, don. one thing i must say is that we
i think it is called, what do you call it? overspeed when you stopped it the speed brake. you would pull the street brake. if you pulled the speed brake lever, marine and mitchell, that would indeed put even more stress on to the aircraft, correct in. yeah. it would increase it. it would add some stress, yes. but you want to get down and expedite your descend as much as possible. i have the speed breakout here because i know we don t have a lot of time and we want to get down. are we at 15,000 feet yet? yeah. i guess at this altitude you can breathe. but you want to get lower. what is the rate of descent? over here we have 5,000 feet per minute. between 4,500 and 5,000 feet per minute. that s extremely high.
you he is asking. he is saying the plane wouldn t have made to it this altitude. and you brought up the idea of a left turn. a second left turn. tracking northeast toward beijing, we know it turned left toward the malaysian peninsula. we can it descend down to 12, possibly even 5,000 feet. then to get here it would have to make another left turn to go due south. so you ve got four or five actions that have to be human. it wasn t programmed to do this. the flight program is to go northeast to beijing. and you ve had this theory all along that it has been human. it can t be anything else but human. if it was a de appreciatization, if that happened. and this has happened before. the plane would have continued to go toward beijing. it would not have turned left, descended, climbed, deskrenled, turned left again. jeffrey thomas, thank you