mary, officials are now reviewing the plane s black boxes. how soon might they have a hint of what might have gone wrong? well, i think they probably already have a pretty good idea what s on there, the cockpit voice recording is literally you download it and listen to it. now, experts have to decide for the sounds on it. and the flight data recorder kind of looks like several lines many lines of an ekg, if you will. and that takes analysis. but here s the problem. if it was a sudden explosion or rapid decompression, a sudden catastrophic event, which according to the flight track that s what it looks like happened, the leads off of the recorders may have been destroyed and come off. and in many crashes where it is a catastrophic event midair, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder do not contain much information other than the sound of a catastrophic explosion. however, in many cases our national transportation safety board has been able to analyze the sounds of the
around him, are you ready? we re all running to first class, i ve got to go, by. said, let s roll. that s the last i heard. we know that the passengers made a rush on the cockpit and thwarteded the hijackers. we know that because the cockpit voice recording, they knew there was a movement afoot in the back and that their moments were numbered up front and we hea heard-someone heard on the cockpit voice recording, they re coming, they re coming. there was a tremendous thrashing around of dishes and carts back and forth. this plane was at least 30 degrees, if not a little more and rapidly go to 45 degrees the other way and rocking back and forth. i guess there was a fight going on and the airplane was rolling from the right to left, right to left. we heard blood screams happening more than once. i don t believe it was the
had the cockpit voice recording. then when they found part of the plane was detached from the plane itself, i mean, we knew right away, because pieces of the plane are just not ever supposed to fall off. once terrorism is eliminated as the cause, investigators focus on why the tail broke off. it takes more than two years before the ntsb findings are released. according to the report, the cause of the crash is the separation of the tail or vertical stabilizer due to the first officer s excessive use of the rudder pedal. the entire vertical fin, which is the vertical stabilizer as well as the rudder separated from the fuselage and the airplane at that time became no longer controllable. ailerons, panels located on the wing, that are used to control the plane. the co-pilot does this but he
well, you know i just more to what mary was saying this is just sort of as i hate to use the terminology closure for the families to confirm that they re indeed the family members were on board. the nature of this accident is going to require that kind of scientific forensics to just verify each victim. yeah, this investigation i have to say it seems that everyday we re learning some new detail mary. are you impressed, surprised at the speed of the investigation? well no, at first in any crash investigation things happen very quickly. in the united states for example the ntsb because delease and they have some reasonable confidence with the transcription and they do release it of the cockpit voice recording. they have been a lot of concerns about the leaks of it.
that have made them more aware sooner that there was this desce descent, that it wasn t just a few more moments of flying before they started to see mountains? yes. and i can t help but remember the parallels between this and united flight 93 and the family members who were able to hear that cockpit voice recording. and the hijackers there with the banging of the food cart on the cockpit door, the passengers got through and banged through and maybe he was speeding up because the pilot in command was banging on the door and the metal sound might have been the foot cart. perhaps he thought he would actually make it through the door, not likely with the reinforced doors. but i couldn t help but draw the parallels between that and flight 93. makes perfect sense when you say that. and he d been doing the research on cockpit door safety prior to this crash. i want to bring in karl penhaul who is live on the story right now. karl, one of the issues with this story is just the sensitive