quickly the thunderstorms developed. that shading of red, by the way, is infrared satellite imagery telling us that the cloud tops were extremely cold and very, very high. we recall what took place in june of 2009 with the air france flight 447, that devastating tragedy that took place. the final outcome was that this plane traveled through thunderstorms and the ice from the upper parts of these thunderstorms blocked a very critical part of the airplane, which was called the pitot tube. this measures the speed of the airplane. and if the speed starts to contradict itself the pilot is going to take it out of autopilot and try to re-establish the airplane. unfortunately, that led to engine failure and the plane ultimately failed. now, this isn t necessarily what had taken place here with our current missing plane, but speculatively speaking this is a very possible scenario. we have got thunderstorms across
this is what s happening here but it s very important to note that we have thunder storms that were present across the last point of contact with our current missing plane. our air asia flight that we re discussing at the moment and thunder storm cloud tops were roughly at 52,000 feet. that s very well above the freezing line in the atmosphere. we re talking about 0 degrees celsius, 32 degrees fahrenheit. that means any cloud particles above that freezing line were in the form of ice. so we could very well see a very similar situation that took place here with what we saw with air france back in june of 2009. this is all speculative but definitely something to consider. this is the point of last contact we ve cycled it on our satellite imagery. here is where the plane took off. it was headed toward singapore and you can just see the convective thunder storms blanketing the java sea and obviously, this area prone to
thunderstorms obviously giving the pilot good reason to redirect their route as they were flying north toward singapore. but keep in mind that turbulence doesn t necessarily bring down an airplane. it usually leads to other human factors. we recall the air france tragedy back in june of 2009. that was attributed to some form of bad weather, and unfortunately the pilot did make an error in rerouting the plane around the thunderstorm that developed, ultimately taking down the air france plane. this is all speculatery of what s actually taking place. all of the information is so new with this particular instance here with airasia. but there s one thing for certain. this is a very active weather pattern across this part of the world. in fact, you can see this moisture flow that s just coming down from the south china sea. this is a northeasterly wind that builds up. all kinds of moisture.
instruments on the airplane. we remember back in june of 2009, air france flight 447, that devastating tragedy that took place, the final outcome that was determined by the air line industry in france, was that this particular plane was downed because of inconsistencies in the speed of the airplane. here is why . the thunder storms that can inevitably travelled through were so high in the atmosphere gnat particles of the cloud in the thunder storm were cold enough to be frozen. we had ice particles. it started to jam up a very crucial part of the airplane. this is the part of an airplane that measures the speed of an airplane. the auto pilot was on. what ended up happening was it got deactivated by human error and then the plane ultimately failed and crashed. now, i don t want to say that
went off and a soldier died and an x number of at that . were killed. you were on the ground in 2009 with the what is it the welsh? the welsh gods. i was just reading some stuff in here about these guys. where were the americans? were you holding down the fort? yes, this was 2009 in afghanistan. they were hanging on for dear life basically without the right equipment and the u.s. marine core x 20,000 were arriving in june of 2009, almost like the cavalry to rescue the situation. and this was the was this like the this was under general mccrystal. there is a lot of stuff about ptsd in here. ptsd is there are so many people suffering from ptsd in afghanistan. is it because the theater of