if that is accurate, what would that suggest to you? well, if the transponder is off, it can suggest a number of things happening. it could suggest a security problem in the cockpit, it can suggest a catastrophic electrical failure. there has been a history of cockpit fires and smokey conditions in this aircraft. and it could suggest that the pilot actually intentionally shut it off themselves. but the four hours, specifically, that it would be flying four hours, and we now know that the u.s. counterterrorism officials are looking into the possibility with this new knowledge that someone could have come into the cockpit. there are precedents for aircraft flying on their own for four hours where the crew becomes disabled. there is such a thing as called insidious decompression, where the decompression is so slow that the pilots aren t aware of it and start to become incapacitated. now, the cockpit warnings can go
thank you so much as we continue scratching our heads over this thing. chris, back to you. got to follow the facts. thanks, brooke. we ll take a break on new day, and when we come back, health secretary kathleen sebelius says your insurance premiums are likely to go up just at a time when democrats are nervous about selling obamacare. good thing the law isn t controversial, right? john king is up next going inside politics. how did we do it last time? i don t know. i forget. hello, neighbors. hey, scott. perfect timing. feeding your lawn need not be so difficult. get a load of this bad boy. sweet! this snap spreader system from scotts makes caring for your lawn snap-crackin simple, guaranteed. just take the handy, no-mess bag, then snap, lock, and go. it s a new day for lawn care, feedings never been so easy. to see a demo of the snap spreader, go to scotts.com. feed your lawn. feed it! and a hotel is the perfect place to talk to you about hotels. all-you-can-eat is a hotel poli
as relates to the second black box they re looking for, the flight data recorder which looks similar to the first one, this is 1300 pieces of data on that fdr, altitude and speed, vertical acceleration heading, pitch, roll all of the parameters, flight parameters engine performance that tell us what was going on in the plane as well as whether there was any sort of decompression event. captain cox, let me bring you in. looking at the debris field, hearing the description of pieces being in some cases smaller than a small car there, again, we are waiting to hear more information. but the fact the pieces are pulverized as described, does that tell you anything? any time you have that number of pieces that are very small like that it says the airplane hit at quite high speed, it is a high energy impact. when you look at other
in fact there mavis a computer coded message, via the transponder of a distress call but that turns out to not be the case. it appears there was literally radio silence from this plane all the way down until it hit the mountain. that would therefore suggest to some investigators and some pilots that the crew simply was either so busy dealing with whatever emergency was on their hands that they couldn t talk on the microphone or they were incapacitated, maybe due to hypoxia or a smoke event? if it was hypoxia, if they had a decompression event and they realized it at 38,000 feet, the normal course of action is don your oxygen masks immediately, telling the people in the badge, your passengers to get the masks on and you drop down to 10,000 feet and level off, because people can breathe the air at 10,000 feet. why did that not happen? why did they continue to
a.m. and all the way to 6800 feet by 10:40.37. that means that this plane went down or descended 32,000 feet over the course of about eight minutes. that s 4,000 feet per minute. that s on the fast side of a descent. not out of the normal range but it certainly is a rather rapid descent. but here s the issue. if this was designed in other words if the pilots did that manually why did the plane then apparently crash into a mountain? if the plane was going down on autopilot and pilots were able to set it for descent, a rapid descent rkts why did they not try to level out at 10,000 feet which would be lts normal altitude you would level off if you re suffering some sort of decompression event because that allows you to get to an altitude where everybody can breathe normally and you can select what type of airport you can detour to assuming there s an emergency. a lot of questions and one piece of information we need to