if you are in the northeast, you should enjoy this mild weather while it lasts. temperatures in the 40s from new york to boston before a potential storm threatens the region sunday and monday. that system could bring snow, sleet, and freezing rain. the dow may be in for a fifth straight day of losses taking a slight dip at the open. investors are worried about the situation in ukraine and a slow down in the chinese economic. the next hour of newsroom after a break. [ male announcer ] this is joe woods first day of work.
if the data reporting system suddenly shut down, how would the pilots handle that? if it was a mechanical failure. if the data reporting systems just shut down, what would the pilots do? if the data reporting system shut down, like the acars, that s a relatively big deal wechdeal. we would talk to dispatchers and maintenance. they are the folks that make the flight plan. they follow us along the route the entire way. we would talk to them and try to trouble shoot it. why is it they are not communicating? you brought this up, carol. there is a certain protocol that i a vee eight. the number one rule in flying
they require a more specific effort to turn them off. a much more complicated procedure. another system called the a cards that tells the planes what it is doing. you can turn that off, again, but you specifically have to know what you re doing and that implies somebody who knew a cockpit and knew what they were doing, right? yes, absolutely. if you re turning off the radios, if you re turning it off, this is somebody who has in-depth knowledge, a very deep understanding of aircraft systems and operation that is going to be doing that. we should say, carol, we are still at altitude and if this were the real flight, we would be landing in beijing in about an hour, hour and 20 minutes. that, of course, never happened with 370. another question for you. the communication systems were shut down separately. what does that tell your pilot there? well, if a malfunction did happen and it s extremely rare that that would have happened,
there is no account that signal was ever sent. at 1:07 on saturday, the data reporting system was shut down and 14 minutes later, that trance ponder was turned off. tell us about the data responding system. there are a lot of things on this airplane that are sending out data. that can be a little broad in that term. sometimes it has been confusing. we are not sure what it is. mitchell, explain, what are the various things transmitting out information. you have acar to send short but vicele messages to a ground. we use that the same way you would use a text on the phone. the ground wants to let you know, we have a problem. maybe a volcano has erupted. you need to deviate 20, 30 miles around the course. maybe we need to tell them we
have a sick passenger. specially useful when we are out of the hf range. you also mentioned the engines transmitted data independent of what the pilot is doing. just to say what their p parameters are at the time. the important thing to remember, shutting those systems off, the radio and the acard system off, that is not easily done, it is not an on/off system. if you are going to shut down, we call this box, the fmc, you have to have an intimate knowledge of the architecture of this system. it is not an on/off switch. you have to go in there. it is many key strokes to delete the flight plan. when you put a flight plan in here. it tunes in automatically and