over and it is for the airlines to be transparent. and in france the authorities were relatively good for the e keeping of the families informed. i hope in this case they are transparent, and releesase the cob pith video recordings, and also the flight data information, because it provides answer s tos to the families, but it is a long and never-ending process of grief for these families. thank you, gentlemen. i want to read this, because germanwings have cancelled a small number of flight, because some of the crew were hesitant to fly. and so they have canceled a number of flights because of the reluctance of flight crew members to fly, and they have respected the wishes and canceled several flight and that is the wishes of the germanwings germanwings. and now, coming up, angelina jolie has life saving surgery
on board, a large shipment in the cargo hold and here s part of the report from the national transportation safety board. the flight had taken off, they were 22 minutes in the flight when the flight crew members indicated to air traffic control that they experienced smoke in the cockpit and were unable to see their radios. they turned that flight around, they tried to get it back on e the. it crashed nine miles sort of the airport, 23 minutes after that first report of smoke in the cockpit. is there the possibility that something like that could have brought down malaysian air? there is and that would need to be evaluated but i think it needs to be evaluated with the security aspects of what went into that cargo hold in terms of who tendered cargo, where was it headed? what do we know about the people putting things in that cargo hold? here in the u.s., we have rules against flying of lithium ion
there are people like the u.s. coast guard, there s a number of very, very sophisticated computer models that can take the actual wind, the actual current on the given days and then begin to build it backwards, to say, okay, this is the likely point of impact. from there, depending on the depth of the water, what s the current? where can we narrow the search down for the main body of the wreckage? what are the other pieces of investigation that are sort going on in parallel right now? while we are looking in the south indian ocean, we don t know for sure that that s where the plane is located. what else is going on in the investigation? well, the parallel investigation is going on. there s a criminal investigation that s looking into the backgrounds of everybody around the airplane, passengers, ground service agents, anyone involved, flight crew members. so that s one piece. on the other hand, you have the accident investigation, which is really kind of depending on finding initial
plane s disappearance? at this point, there s still more questions than answers. joining me are captain john cox, a retired airline pilot, and jim cavanau cavanaugh, an nbc law enforcement analyst, who s been deeply involved in many high-profile investigations, including the unabomber case. thank you both for being on the show tonight. thanks, reverend al. my pleasure. captain, malaysia airlines officials believe the co-pilot was the last one to talk to air traffic controllers. what would be the significance of that? there s really no significance in it. the flight crew members swap duties, depending on different legs, and that just means that the routine radio transmissions is were being handled by the first officer, fully qualified, and he s an experienced pilot. so this would be a very routine, normal event. now, jim, if you were leading this investigation, how intently
would shut off either a cataclysmic event or somebody did it on purpose. the transponders which transmit at tour altitude speed. they haven t found any debris in the area where the transponders were shut off, so that would suggest potentially somebody did that on purpose. greg, do you want to pick up on that, please? absolutely. tom brings up a good point. if there was an explosive decompression. let s say a window blew out or a door blew out and material was actually sucked out of the aircraft, you would expect to see even the lightest debris along the flight path. the searchers haven t found any of that, especially over the water. so given the fact that if the airplane is intact and that turn was made, that wouldn t have been made by an auto pilot because the auto pilot would have already had a preprogrammed route of flight to go to beijing and it would have continued on track. so it s evident that the course was altered and most likely altered intentionally by either one of the