to tom and investigators, they can be so slow that it s too slow. people need to know quickly. it s good to know that the airbus didn t have a decompression event or a mechanical system failure. those things need to come out quickly. there s a press to have more transparency in the investigations. there s always going to be this push pull between the media and public s right to know and investigators. what do you think? do you want to react? miles it s true. it s a balancing act, especially getting information out if there are other aircraft out there that have a defect that needs immediate correction or just this the policies of who flies, who gets in the cockpit to fly it. miles has a point. law enforcement has to balance that. they do. it s very difficult. stand by. just ahead, more live reports on the flight 9525 investigation. our correspondents are digging for new information right now. we have news about a new indictment against the united states senator.
note no what they call good-bye note. he could have been driving to the airport to go to work and gotten a phone call that said it s over, not seeing you anymore, that could have added to the mental situation he would have already been in. but we ll have to hear more about this medical condition because it s a persistent condition. he didn t catch a cold and go to the doctor. they re talking about multiple notes over a longer period of time. what kind of persistent chronic condition did he have? they re saying now it was not depression. there could be obviously a lot of other causes. but depression you heard that report from will ripley that depression is apparently not something he was suffering from. and the investigators so far have been very careful about putting out information. for instance even in the very first press conference, they indicated it was not a decompression event. they gave us hints. so i think here they re trying
correspondent tom costello from france nbc s claudio lavanga, john cox, former fbi special agent don borelli, michael kay, and frances rivera with more on other cases can of deliberately crashed planes. i want to start with nbc news correspondent tom costello. what stood out to you today about the reveal the transparency of the findings of french investigators about the co-pilot s actions? listen i think over the last two days many of us were thinking there must have been a decompression event of some sort. although, i said from the beginning we should not rule out the possibility of a criminal act. that s exactly what happened here. i think what was surprising is that the germans, and especially lufthansa, does not have a policy whereby one pilot leaves to go to the restroom somebody else has to take his or her place. usually a flight attendant to stand guard in the cockpit. that was not and is not policy in germany or on lufthansa. so you had a scenario here where the captain leave
thorough and careful analysis to determine who is on that cockpit voice recorder and what are the sounds. because remember, the recording is for two hours. so it s possible they might be hearing the pilots sitting at the gate, they might hear maintenance people in the cockpit, et cetera. every time the flip a switch is flipped in the cockpit, that kind of thing, they need to understand what are all those sounds. it s a very thorough audio type of analysis that goes on. this could take weeks, actually. they want to marry that up with the flight data recorder. it s not until you get both pieces of the puzzle that you can create a very complete picture. so let me give you a sense. the flight data recorder essentially carries anywhere from well, in the neighborhood of 25 hours of data, the previous 25 hours of flight and it s about a thousand to 1300 pieces of data. everything from altitude to speed to vertical acceleration, heading, pitch, roll. was there a decompression event
common explanation for that is that somehow this crew was incapacitated. right away? incapacitated, you know, so that points to the possibility of decompression of these pilots, every simulator session trained for that emergency, they have quick oxygen masks, they should be able to put them on in five seconds, at that altitude they have 30 seconds of useful consciousness. it s very difficult to explain. we have great authority. this mystery will be solved. talk, it happened when they reached their cruising altitude, the highest that they were going to be, and about a minute or two after that, this tragedy began, right? yeah, that s right. literally, one to three minutes at 38,000 feet and then the descent began, this unexplained descent. you know, i think it s also important to note here that if it was a decompression event, as you ve just heard and that i ve got to tell you, a lot of people are kind of guessing right now that that may have happened, that they lost consciousn