good friday morning to you all. thank you for being here. i m t.j. holmes. i m brandi hitt in for reena ninan. hoar are some of the top headlines we re following this morning on world news now . the cyber attack on federal personnel records was far deeper and more problematic than the white house it indicated. millions more people were affected. we have the details coming up. the search for those two escaped murderers is intensifying after their escape from an upstate new york prison. dogs picked up the men s scent at a gas station. the pilot of the germanwings plane reached out to doctors before crashing his airplane. german privacy laws prevented the doctors from sharing information like that with the airline. and lebron james cut his head during this nasty fall. he ran into a courtside camera.
to identify where that might have come in. you know, is there some reason that somebody that was a passenger on that plane might be in the middle of a business dispute or marital dispute or something of that nature where someone might want to inconvenience them or hassle them in some way. when you have an anonymous phone threat, people can say anything, they could say that plane has a nuclear device on it and there s no way until you search it to know whether it does or not. as mary correctly pointed out, every airport, particularly in the u.s., has a specific d designated spot where a plane in trouble, whether high jacked or whatever the situation is, is supposed to go which takes them away from the terminal, off the main runway area, puts them in a secure area where the fbi and the other authorities can control the situation, bring in communications, establish a perimeter around the plane and go to work essentially because as mary said it s going to be a
subway gassings in tokyo they used a particular kind of weapon that had two plastic bags full of chemicals and those together mixed to create a concoction. they will have to do a careful search through all the bags, all the planes, because it s a chemical threat and not a bomb, the explosive dogs, the bomb dogs, may not be as much help as they ordinary would. the passengers on the planes are in for a rather long day as they will have to search literally everything on the plane. absolutely. and those are reports that it is a chemical weapons threat, not necessarily confirmed yet by our sources. everyone is looking into it at this point. if it would be, if that would be the nature of the threat, a chemical weapons threat, that seems more unusual than what you normally hear if you will on these in terms of a threat to planes. as you point out, these threats come in so often, what does this then mean for the other part of this investigation trying to track down who tipped off law enfor
jean, thank so much for bringing us up to date. let s discuss what this all means as this develops as we speak. bring in former fbi assistant director and cnn analyst tom fuentes joining us from washington and former inspector general of the u.s. department of transportation, and cnn aviation analyst, mary schiavo joining us from south carolina. as jean points out, more questions than answers at this point but they scrambled two f-15 fighter jets so they re clearly taking this seriously. what does this mean for how they re going to investigate this threat? kate, they ve had this happen so often with getting a bomb threat or some unspecified anonymous threat to aircraft, they have to take it seriously. they scramble the jets so they have an eye on the plane as it s in the air and i think that the question there is, if they thought it had been hijacked or thought they had a pilot go rogue like the germanwings plane, would the f-16s have shot
it down if it started heading for, you know, the tall buildings of manhattan like we experienced in 9/11. now at this point, it s landed safely. they ll do as they ve done in so many of these, do a search of the plane to determine if an explosive device has been planted and if they find no evidence of that, that will be the end of it and they ll go forward other than trying to identify who made the threat, who made the call. absolutely. and that s a whole other different kind of leg of the investigation. let s get to that in a second. mary, to you, what is happening with the plane right now? does it as tom kind of points out, does it depend on what the real nature of this threat was to this plane? what scenario are they going through right now? i happened to be at detroit the day of the underwear bomber on christmas day a number of years ago and what they do is take it to a remote part of the airport and because it s a chemical threat, they will also have to very carefully search