year of campaigning. now it is time to vote. one week from tonight, we could know who won iowa. donald trump is about to raise from the courtroom to the campaign trail and pack again as his rivals are hoping to pull off an upset. also tonight, the missing piece of that alaskan airlines plane that blew off at 16,000 feet in the air has now been found. more planes are being grounded for inspections as one major airline says they found something. i m kaitlan collins, and this is the source. it has been one week now since defense secretary lloyd austin was admitted to the icu. tonight, not only do we still not know what exactly sent him there, we don t know why his staff didn t tell the white house for days that he was even in the hospital. nonetheless, in intensive care. the lack of transparency from a top u.s. military official, especially while the u.s. is dealing with multiple crises around the world, has resulted in some calls for austin s resignation. the top republic
these airplanes are in during manufacture at boeing, even though the tube is actually made by a vendor, when it gets to boeing, boeing is using that particular door for bringing in interior parts and that kind of thing during the assembly process. once that s done, it has to be, of course, reconnected. and then it has to be sealed. the bolts have to be in place and it has to be signed off. the question is, why are these bolts coming loose? and there s a number of reasons for it, i m sure. what would those reasons be? well, when you look at it, depending on the type of bolt and nut assembly they re using, that airplane, the tube itself is constantly blowing up and shrinking with pressurization cycles. of course, then you have the twisting moment of that fuselage tube from aerodynamic loads. like anything else, a nut and a bolt will loosen itself. the question is, why aren t
they ll be looking for the black boxes. it s unclear whether they ll find the black boxes among the larger debris or somewhere else in the water. quite a bit of time before they can officially tell anybody what went wrong with this flight. nbc s katy tur, thanks very much. we ll be back with you throughout the morning. greg, we don t want to get into a great deal of speculation, but in terms of debris field 40 bodies, what does this tell you? immediately, the fact that we have bodies floating we have what looks to be interior debris with life vests and interior material, says the fuselage tube broke up in some regard. so a portion of that fuselage is not intact. it s opened up seats and people and luggage and that kind of thing have floated out of it. now the question is where is the rest of the debris and taking an inventory to make sure we have all of those parts in a generalized area. we could still have a portion of that airplane having broken up