to give the families assistance. of course. just to clarify, mr. sharuji, when you said a press conference, you said 11:00 local time. i have to leave right now. okay. can you just confirm one thing? is the press conference in 15 minutes? is that what you said? the press conference will be at 11:00 malaysian time about 15 minutes from now. thank you very much indeed for your time, sir, i appreciate. it thank you, bye. the confirmation there from malaysia airlines there will be a press conference we think in about 15 minutes. 11:00 a.m. local time, which will be nearly 11 hours after this airplane went missing. want to go back to greg feith, former senior ntsb investigator and an aviation security consultant. greg, you heard there what the v.p. of operations control said for malaysia airlines. they have discounted all these various rumors flying around that the plane has been recovered safely. and they clearly have no idea what has happened to this plane. did you deduce an
ancient black box that recorded very few parameters and didn t really shed light on what happened. if you look at other crashes at sea, virgin air 301 which crasheded in july of 95, in the dominican republic, they never recovered the airplane. they recovered the boxes. and about three hours after that they knew what had happened. it s difficult at sea but it s by no means impossible. and there are some crashes on line where the terrain is so rugged it becomes very difficult. i would suspect that finding out what happened to this plane is going to be arduous but will be thorough and will be accomplished. it just won t be quick. and important to note that all we know at the moment is that this plane has gone missing. they ve lost all contact with the plane. we know more than that. it doesn t necessarily mean it s crashed though, does it? no. we know more than that. we know that it sure isn t in the air. because it didn t have fuel to keep flying for this long.
on a discreet freeiquency with their company. if malaysia says it lost communication with the airplane, an atc is saying they have no two-way communication, then we have to assume that the airplane for whatever reason has gone out of communique. now, i heard jim kalstrom and matt talk about contact. northern track, there s a lot of stuff on the internet about this airplane being over the top of vietnam. that may not be necessarily true. and a lot of those tracks will take the airplane over the south china sea so it s over water. and so they may not be able to make a landing on land if they had control of the airplane. and if the airplane did go into the water, then of course we don t have any kind of emergency locater transmitter that would assist in the search and rescue efforts. it will probably be finding
their mandatory reports or not. if the plane had suffered some kind of catastrophic electrical failure, would it have any way had it landed without disintegrating, would any of the crew have any way of contacting the airline in another way that didn t involve electronics? are they set up these planes for that eventuality? the airplanes, if you were to lose all ship s power, the airplane by certification has to have battery backup power. so they still have to be able to utilize certain flight instruments and communication tools to complete the flight safely. so you could lose all the generators. you could have a two engine out where you have no [ inaudible ] or power. but the battery backup. and it only will operate for a certain period of time. and it s intended for an
stuff, debris floating on the ocean. from cnn weather center, the weather at kuala lumpur airport at the time of takeoff about ten hours ago showed partly cloudy skies, light winds, less than 10 miles per hour, estimated the plane would have been over cambodia or vietnam at the time it lost contact. there s no significant weather issues in that area, no big storms or anything. if there s been no weather element to all this obviously we have no idea could it just simply be engine failure? would that be enough to bring a plane like this down? well, there s a number of things, piers. one of the big things of course if you had an engine failure, the airplane is certified to fly on one of the two engines. and they have what s called etop, or extended range if you will. you have to be within a certain time period of landfall if in fact you lose an engine for whatever reason. if they lost both engines, then of course that changes the