he had just taken off, we understand, from georgetown airport in austin, which means he would have been full of fuel. how much fuel might we be talking about in a single-engine aircraft? somewhere between 50 and 90 gallons in that airplane. weighs about the same amount as an suv. okay. you ve seen the pictures we re showing on tv about the burn coming out of that building? i have, yes. does that seem consistent with 50 to 90 gallons of fuel and setting on fire things on fire inside the building? and maybe some things got set on fire in the building. it doesn t seem to be it was a huge conflagration. i wish he had chosen another way of doing this. i think the building is 100 feet off the ground or something like that. there would be no reason at all for a single-engine flight to be anywhere near that height. no, we ll say it s a seven-story building, that s 70 feet of altitude. no one is flying at 70 feet. this is clearly an unusual
so, they ve landed there. at salt lake international, and now they re holding on to absolutely everyone who was inside the plane. i think we have a little sound here. a sound bite, from a woman at the airport, who is explaining what is happening. oh, we do not? i ll talk you through it. it s an airport spokeswoman we got some sound from earlier, what is happening now they are not allowed to let anyone leave obviously. there are investigators on the scene, including federal investigators trying to find out where the note came from, how it same to be about. our local affiliate, ksl, said there were 193 passengers on board that flight, and, again, if you re someone who s concerned, if you re traveling today, you want to check on how someone is in that plane, it s united airlines flight 741. it s a boeing 757, it was taken off from denver, and it was en route to san francisco, and it has been diverted to salt lake city. and satisfy ge and, again, ali, it is because a threatening note was o
plan was not filed. jim tillman, everybody does not have to file a flight plan when they take off in a planle. absolutely. if they are going from one place to another, if they don t have to have flight filing, they generally don t file. tell me something else, jim, for people who don t know who have never flown a plane, explain to me how in a commercial plane like that, it generally goes where you tell it to go. it doesn t sort of do its own thing unless you lose control of the plane. no. and this from everything we ve heard from the eyewitnesss, the airplane was flying in what s considered to be controlled flight. he was able to turn the airplane, everything else. why was he that low? why was he flying at that altitude if he didn t have something in mind which was not very good? he was about 15 miles out from the airport, so there s no reason to below that close to a seven-story building. absolutely not. and from some eyewitnesss, claimed that he overflew a retaining wall
situation. where do small planes level off? once they take off from airports, where do they ascend to before they start, you know, flying level? in an area like this, you have to be at least 1,000 above of anything in the nearby radius of just to be safe above the ground. so, a minimum of 1,000 feet. honestly, he should be 3,000 to 4,000 feet. there were people there are a lot of reports coming in. we don t know what we don t know. but there were people who sounded like it was coming in from full throttle. would anybody outside know that from a small plane? would you know the difference? i certainly wouldn t be able as a flight instructor on the ground to be able to know if the plane was coming in at full throttle. you could make a judgment as the speed it was moving. but generally speaking in a plane like that if you haven t lost control of flight, meaning you haven t lost lift or it s not in a spin or a spiral dive, it s not common that it would be out of your control yet
of fuel, an aerodynamic fall, or an engine failure. none of that could have happened, because eyewitnesss are reporting controlled high-speed flight into the building. so that leaves us with pilot incapacitation, which also doesn t fit the facts either, because they said it was a straight and level flight. it looked like controlled flight. so it does not look like a good situation, and sadly with reports coming in that it may be related to a house fire and perhaps a stolen plane, there are a lot of questions to be answered here about how he got access to the plane. so how do they start piecing together these questions and answers so early on? they re still trying to tap out the fire totally. well, that s right. and you know, my thoughts in looking at it are just based on years of experience of working other plane crashes, other small plane crashes and having flown the piper cherokee 140, which is what they are saying this kind of plane is, it s a small general aviation plane. it s