and it to fly six hours is statistically unlikely when you look at the history of in-flight fire. this will be an extreme outlier. there s no evidence to support it. have we ever been so captured and gripped by an aviation mystery like this before? no, i think the last time the world was this fascinated by a missing airplane the captain s name was amelia earhart. such a great point. thank you all for talking with me this morning, and we will be following the latest developments on this all morning. we will be on it and satellite pictures when we get them will go straight to you. keep it here on msnbc. more news straight ahead.
most of us in the business, the aviation business, real good chance this is probably on to something. let s keep looking tore sure. the indian navy still looking in the north. i m sure the malaysians have assets searching or their coast along with the thais and the burmese. it s a matter of time until we can deliver those areas and really hone in as many assets as possible in this potential crash site. one other piece of information that we have is that there s been a significant number of lithium eion batterie as part of the cargo of this plane. they can be flammable. does that raise any red flags for you as an investigator? it s certainly something they ll look at. there are lithium batteries on every flight around the world. so this is common? it s very, very common. these were shipped, the malaysians say they were shipped in accordance with the proper regulations and packaging. i think it s a low likelihood. for a major fire to be onboard
some people refer to this they turned them off you but that s not necessarily the case. if there was a fire onboard it could have disabled the equipment. and so then the curiosity the plane seems to have turned intentionally to the west from its northeast path. and so if something happened perhaps the pilots were still able to turn the plane perhaps to make an emergency landing, and then the question what might have prevented that? with the very little information that we have about the flight, we still have to explore every possibility, the reason that they re searching in the southern indian ocean is because a piece of the equipment that wasn t sending out messages but continued to tray to search for a satellite and so there was one pin g an hour for seven hours so it appears to have kept flying so they re looking along the path it might have been. john, let s say we locate one of these pieces of debris, what happens next? well, we look then to say, okay, now we have a known star
france 447 from the floating debris and then when they found the debris on the bottom they were able to ascertain pretty quickly the airplane had hit at a very high vertical rate with a low forward speed and you could tell that by the defamation of the skin around things like the ghali. so the fi galley. if there was an onboard fire there will be soot. those are the things investigators will look for once weep find the main body of the wreckage and that will determine what pieceses they want to bring up. the recorders, definitely, those will be brought up possibly if they re found, and i think they will be. but the physical evidence as far as other parts of the airplane, photographic evidence, the investigators will conclude what adds value to the investigation and that s what they ll want to recover. and, shawn, in your experience with the fbi when you re conducting an investigation of this magnitude where there s also a human tragedy and impacted families
airplane subsequently crashing after a known in-flight fire, it happens relatively quickly. because there s an awful lot of things if it s an electrical fire, for example, you can get arc temperatures and electrical short somewhere between 7,000 degrees fahrenheit and as much as 16,000 degrees fahrenheit. the electrical component of the fire acts as an ignition source for things around it. swiss air 111 being an example. my lar insulation in the overhead had literally caught on fire after being ignited by the electrical short. the crew wasn t aware of it and they were running the cockpit smoke checklist. in every single case where there s been a fire like that, the crew s been able to communicate with air traffic control to let them know what the situation was. in miami in 1996. the cargo compartment fire. the crew didn t know the fire was there until it burned through the floor of the passenger cabin.