descent. but as les just said, that s not so precipitous. right. and i checked the descent rates for this aircraft, looked at the charts and the tables and this is one that s allowed. now, at this altitude, though, the recommended descent rate is less than that. but it s not the kind of a descent rate that would cause pieces of the plane to come apart. it wasn t an uncontrolled descent rate and the plane wasn t dropping from 38,000 feet at terminal velocity. but this is higher than what s recommended for the airbus at that altitude but certainly not something where the pilots were causing damage to the plane. but it s significant in that they were getting down in a hurry for whatever reason or possibly an uncommanded reason. that is what is intriguing, les, that they had these six minutes to descend to 14,000 feet and yet no information was sent back to any air traffic control anywhere that there was a problem.
and out of the way. making way to clear the runway for use back again. most of the people have said, it is a write-off. probably won t ever use that aircraft again. but what forensically will the aircraft tell us in terms of who s at fault for this? two little boxes will tell all. and we ll know soon. getting the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder will tell us everything. it will tell us the descent rate, what actions were taken, did the spoilers come out, did the thrust resisters come out, did one brake grab one way or another. was one side of the runway more slick? whenever i hear about getting those data recorders and cockpit voice recorders it s usually because we don t have a pilot to speak with or any passengers to speak with either. here we have everyone. so what s going on with the
she represents families and victims after plane crashes and david soucie is here with us cnn safety analyst, former faa safety inspector and author of flight 370: why it disappeared and why it s ohm a matter of time before it happens again. let s tick through the developments and headlines overnight. we know mary, let s talk about the search area. the more probable area that they re talking about. it sounds more focused. but it is still 2,000 square miles. it is it s a large area. but, with each additional piece of wreckage and with human remains they can narrow in more and more by using the drift patterns and calculating back where the plane went in. and with the reports of the climb rate and the descent rate they can also pretty much calculate that the plane went straight down. so while it s a big area, it s certainly more focused. great technology being used and put into service right now. three ships reportedly they re using side-scan sonar, which you ve told us about quite a
explain that to us. basically not just the net air speed. yes. the indicated air speed, i think, and maybe jeffrey can help me with this but i didn t see that we knew the indicated air speed there. so what we re talking about is the distance that it traveled from one point to another and how far it went on the ground speed, indicating help me understand this but it looks like the aircraft was then at an extremely high descent rate which would make sense, but at the same time we re saying it was an ascent rising too. so help me understand that part too, jeffrey. it doesn t seem to make sense to me without the indicated air speed. indeed. the winds that were forecast in the area was only a tail wind of about 25 miles per hour. so that wasn t a major factor in the overall speed of this
i think what we re missing out of the equation here is over what kind of time frame did they go from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet down to an extremely low altitude for an aircraft like this of we were just calculating how long, mitchell, it would take if you did it at a reasonable descent rate. reasonable descent, 15-20 minutes. reporter: what we ve done so we set the scenario here we are flying over the strait of ma lack ca, just as the aircraft has done in a northerly direction and right now at 6,000 feet pause we figured you didn t want us to talk for 15, 20 minutes if we took you all the way down. over the south part you have the northern part of malaysia and in the distance ask, the island of sumatra. the jumbo jet flying at 4,000