problem, mayday, nothing of that order at all. we had an initial, early report 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 descend? was it because, if they realized they h
ocean if they re lucky is a black box. and as we ve said, they re not black, they re orange because that s the mandate from the federal government since the 1960s. so you can spot one of these easily in wreckage. in a plane wreckage. but specifically, here s the pinger on the end of it that now has about, we re told, less than two weeks of mandatory battery life in it. it may be going longer than that, but it is required to go for 30 days, and we ve now used up more than half of that time already. in the black box itself, there are two components to the black box, right? there s the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. in the data recorder, you re going to have hundreds of parameters of data. nearly 1,000. it s going to be everything including engine speed and the heat of the engine at the time. what are the settings like in the cockpit? what was the trim like? how was the plane positioned? were the passengers in the back were they wearing oxygen masks? was there a decomp