first officer, the pilot handling the radios told them they could no longer make boston. that very significant statement was lost on air traffic control. at 9:22 p.m., avianca flight 52 is cleared to land but with an extremely low cloud ceiling above jfk the pilot misses the attempt. the plane is again diverted from the airport. nowhere did the first officer ever use the word, emergency. if that word had been used they would have given them immediate priority to try to get them on the ground. climb, maintain 3,000. we re just finding out if okay. 3,000, we re okay. 9:34 p.m., flight 52 runs out of fuel. the engines flame out.
plane. so the people combing there this are going to have a very difficult time indeed. the black boxes have pingers on them so they ll be able to track them down probably fairly easily. but even that could be difficult especially if it starts snowing and this all gets covered with a couple of inches or a foot of snow or something like that. it s going to be a very complicated effort. and you have to hike in here. this is not a place i understand from some of the locals that you have you can drive to a point about 45 minutes away on foot from where the crash site is. so the rescuers and the searchers will have to walk in or else be dropped from helicopters as they were a few hours ago. ashleigh? right. it s those helicopters that you have to be so concerned about when the weather is inclement like this. you have a low cloud ceiling, you have to be extraordinarily careful of that. karl penhaul, jim bittermann, thank you for that. stand by. i have a comment from the white house.
marseilles didn t seem so far away with an extraordinary landing capacity, a large airport with long runways. how does that equate? true. but they may have been very focused on the terrain and trying to be situationally aware of how close they were in other words, you can t just dial in marseilles and have the airplane head for it. you ve got to know where the threat of terrain is. and that airport may not it may have had weather issues possibly. that s on the computer as an alternate, i m certain of that. quickly, mary, chad reported the cloud ceiling is expected to be upwards of, i think, 6,000 feet. what is your prognosis for the possibility that helicopters are going to have to stop all work at that kind of a cloud cover? well, they would have to because the elevation of the wreckage and of much of the wreckage debris field exceeds that. and particularly the photos from the wreckage scene are just
obliterated, dislocated was the word used in translation, that effectively there is just nothing left of this plane. and of course the sighting of human remains but no sightings so far of any survivors. and the announcement early that it is unlikely there will be any survivors. what you are seeing on your screen right now is exactly what it would look like in the united states if there were a crash. there would be a staging area that looked exactly like this, with responders and tents and emergency vehicles at the ready, a large zone set up and ready to go for whatever it is they come across. tragically, though, the weather, a huge problem, even the helicopters will struggle against that low cloud ceiling and the inclement weather that s coming in. let alone being able to spot anything once that snow falls. back right after this. mensure active heart health.r heart: i maximize good stuff, like my potassium and phytosterols which may help lower cholesterol. new ensure active heart healt
in the only medicare supplement insurance plans endorsed by aarp. don t wait. call now. continuing our breaking news coverage of the flight germanwings flight 9525. search and rescue crews using helicopters to try to get to the crash site. we ve got pictures sent to us from one of our cnn international reporters. it is proving terribly difficult to access the scene because the plane, an airbus a320, went down in the mountains in the french alps. complicating the matters is the terrible weather, weather that s moving in. temperatures currently below freezing, expected to drop and a very low cloud ceiling. the flight took off from barcelona, spain, about 5:00 a.m. eastern time headed to dusseldorf in germany with 150 people on board including two babies. after about 45 minutes into the