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
proximity, guided by radar, not the heat of the engines. a heat-seeker will go to the engine and you ll get exactly what david is talking about. but if it in fact exploded in proximity of the tail, you would not necessarily get a fire on the aircraft, but you certainly would lose control of the aircraft, it would break up in-flight. it would match everything we re seeing here. but going back to what david said, putting blinders on at this stage, is not a good idea at all. i think we have plenty of evidence right now on the ground, and there will be concrete evidence, to find out if the explosion happened internally, blew outward or broke up from something an external force. that kind of information will be there, will be available. one thing that s important, we should take a look at a 30-mile disk around where this happened and see if there are military installations there, see if there are buk missile launchers. they re mobile, but nevertheless, we have a lot of assets trained in t
delayed explosion that was implanted? no, i m talking about the warhead on the suspected missile, the alleged missile that would have hit this. it s 150 pounds and high explosion with fragmentation, and it s a radar proximity fuse. so would that give you the same kind of characteristic you were describing? well, certainly would. first of all, you re talking about implanting the head of that warhead missile into an aircraft flying at 32,000 feet flying at 480 knots. so it would have to have gotten into the aircraft and exploded later? is that what you re trying to say? if it impacts the aircraft at all in the air, then it would cause a fire on board that aircraft. there is no way it wouldn t. rick, you re saying you don t think that s necessarily the case. no, i m not explaining this correctly, i guess. no, what i m saying you must not be hearing. i m sorry, rick. go ahead and explain what you believe what might have happened with the missile. if this was the buk missile
on this one video, saying that because you don t see a smoke trail before the impact on the ground, you don t believe that the plane was in any way on fire or had been hit by any kind of a missile. yeah. if it had been let by a missile, you would see evidence of that in the air. colonel? this is rick francona. if i described the warhead to you, what we re looking at is 150 pounds of high explosion fragmentation warhead, proximity fused, would that change your opinion at all? i don t know what you re even talking about. why would that have anything to do with this? no. i m saying, if what struck the aircraft was a 150-pound warhead that was radar-fused to go off in the neighborhood of it, would that change your opinion? so you re saying, rather than a missile that actually struck the aircraft, and this is an actual device, you re saying you re talking about a
just suspect. i m not saying it s not a missile, rick. i m just saying it s suspect to me, because if there is something significant enough in a missile or any kind of impact to that aircraft, it would have caused some sort of fire on board, whether it was a true impact or whether it was radar exploded like you said. either way, something to bring the aircraft down would have started some kind of smoke, some kind of fire, if the engines were out, in my mind. of course, i m not a military expert such as you. jeff, your thoughts. i wanted to point out there is a bit of a historical precedent here, 1983, soviet fighter shot down a korean airlines 747. and in this case you saw the plane stay aloft for a while. the pilots lost control of the tail so weren t able to maintain the correct pitch and went one up and down and eventually crash. miles o brien joining us, aviation analyst. what do you make of david s thoughts? and, again, david raises i think the most important point here,