this is incredibly rather to have a public demonstration like this on the streets of beijing. david mckenzie is there on the streets there tonight. kyung lah is in perth. kyung, what kind of aircraft are up in the air right now and how are conditions in the search area? reporter: we can actually hear the turbo props of a p 3 orion right behind me. it is going to take off shortly. the australian military says that representing a number of other countries all zooming to this area right now. it s a variety of planes, some military planes, some civilian planes, a total of 12 planes in the air including a p 8 poseidon u.s. plane. that s a high tech military plane that has radar, that has a number of search teams aboard. and they re all looking for that piece of debris, that evidence. the hard part is as you mentioned the weather, anderson. the weather conditions are not ideal. the clouds are still quite low. but they are certainly improved
they were shouting out they wanted evidence, answers, closure, pointing at the malaysian government for a lack of information. also many of them angry that they got this information in text messages that the plane had gone down, often in english which they couldn t understand. so you can really see the sense of this pressure cooker here in china with these families just wanting news, wanting some kind of closure, anderson. did malaysian officials, anybody from the embassy actually talk to the families? reporter: well, the police, the chinese police both plain-clothed and uniformed police, kept reporters very far from the scene around 100 meters from the scene of the malaysian embassy. so we weren t able to see what exactly went down inside the embassy. what is clear, that as you say, very rare to allow a public demonstration here in beijing in china at the center of the communist party. i have to stress this, the authorities were allowing this
example what would have happened. martin savidge, if a plane runs out of fuel as is believed happened here, how does a plane this size enter the water? are there different scenarios? is it a glide down? one engine loses power before the next? reporter: right. these are things we ve been trying to simulate. put it into like neutral if you will and we ll sort of show you. we can t shut the engines off. the simulator doesn t allow that. it would do all sorts of computer problems. but we have tried this. put the engines completely in neutral. take the plane off of auto pilot. and then you let go of the controls. the aircraft is designed and engineered, this is true of many aircraft, it s built to fly. even though the engines are no longer running in this scenario, the plane is designed to be level and controlled and to make a low descent. we are doing that very slow and gradual. now again, it s a simulator. so of course the engines, it s
decompression. either way. we re simplifying this greatly. pilot mitchell here puts it into a very steep descent. at the same time the aircraft begins to turn. the idea you want to get this plane heading back to some airport. we were over water at the time so either back to kuala lumpur or the closest near by. but you re descending primarily because you ve only got so much oxygen. pilots would already have their emergency oxygen on board. if it s a sudden decompression, the passengers have had the masks flopped down in front of them. they only get about ten minutes. you ve got to get down quickly to an altitude where people can breathe. in this case we re saying 12,000, but even per would be about 10,000 feet. but for the scenario you stabilize. you get the aircraft back into a reasonable position. you level off. you ve apparently figured out it s not that severe. and somehow you get it on automatic pilot. or you put it on automatic pilot and you re overcome either by smoke or simply l
deliberately or going over land indonesia. if you were in extremis you re going over malaysia and there are air spaces where you can land. and secondly there are plenty of places with the may day call that you could have landed in indonesia. and then you ve got this southwest or south turn before you get this long journey down into the south indian ocean. so the ghost plane theory is there, and helios in 2005 did exactly that. the pilots became overcome. everybody was overcome except for one flight attendant who managed to get to the cockpit. they scrambled, in cyprus, this scrambled fighters. and the fighters actually watched the plane all the way to the ground. they watched the engines flame out. on both sides. then they watched it go into the mountainside. so was on auto pilot but an