unplanned and they had a lot to deal with quickly. captain sullenberger, you know what it s like to have to make a quick decision when something goes wrong on a flight. you say that when faced with a sudden emergency, pilots have a list of priorities, can you explain what those are? absolutely, in fact, most pilots know them by heart. they re very simple. first aviate, then navigate and only last, communicate. the pilots would have been working together as a crew, there would be one pilot to his assigned a pilot flying in charge of controlling a flight path, the other pilot was monitoring to assist, aid and monitor the performance of the airplane and the other pilot and make sure that everything was being done according to their procedures. that pilot monitoring would be the one typically who would be using the checklist, who would be talking to air traffic control on the radio, every way supporting and assisting the pilot flying. there are very well-defind roles and responsibiliti
individual pilots and use techniques, human skills to make them more synergistic, to make them better as a team than they ever could have been as a collection of individuals. what do you mean, captain toman, of the malaysian military, the plane may have been turning around before it vanished. i would imagine when planes change course, there s a protocol they follow? i like the fact that they say it may have been turning. i m not sure it was. let s say the airplane broke up because of something that happened there. radar returns may not be as accurate as it is normally. so i d like to examine that radar return a lot more carefully and i d like to look at a lot more things before i make the determination that he s going to do a 180 out there. i m surprised to think the captain would make a 180 at that point in the flight. captain sullenberger, in terms of actually finding this aircraft, if it is in the water, i go back to that air france flight.
jim toman. he flew commercial jets for near 30 years. captain sullenberger, for a boeing 777 to disappear, it s one of the most reliable airlines out there, isn t it? it is. and it disappeared during one of the least risky phases of flight, during cruise. the most risk, obviously, is during a landing or takeoff. long haul planes will be spending more of their time in cruise and be statistically safer than short range aircraft. the 777, it s got built in redundancy, it has backup systems if something goes wrong. those systems weren t enough to right whatever went wrong and the crew didn t have enough time or wasn t able to for whatever reason, to actually communicate. what does that tell you? it tells me that something some kind of catastrophe took place there that was sudden and
reporter: that s why the mystery behind how this flight vanished has stumped the world, even pilots like mike weiss who flew 777s. this was way out of the ordinary, this is just something that happened instantaneously or relatively quickly and overcame the crew and overcame the aircraft. reporter: since the first 777 rolled off the assembly line in 1994, the planes have made about 5 million flights. yet its first fatal crash came last july, when this asiana airlines 777 crashed in san francisco, three people died, the cause still under investigation. but in this crash, finding the plane itself is still the first priority. the priority indeed. the perspective now from captain chezly sully sullenberger, and