airplane, but it s going to be expensive and demand serious technology. reminder of the sheer scope of the size of this earth. not just that, but the remarkable feat that is air travel and the fact we do this every day. extraordinary. airline captains latane campbell, karen pellicone, ross aimer. that s all in for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts now. good evening, rachel. good evening, chris. thanks to you at home for staying with us this hour. i want to tell you upfront near on the interview tonight which is happening later on this hour, we ve got a really big deal guest. here for the interview. the malaysian airlines plane that went missing had three american citizens onboard. two of them were little kids. toddlers. one of them is a 50-year-old ibm executive named philip wood. philip wood is one of the people on that missing plane. his partner, his girlfriend is going to be joining us live this hour. that is the interview tonight. i want to make sure you know that
it s going to take extraordinary technology, for example, submarines or what not that may eventually find the aircraft. the average depth of the indian ocean is 12,600-plus feet. it has parts of it i think are as deep as 26,000 feet. when you start getting in the deep depths later on, if, for example, if it were like air france 447, a year later they re looking for the airplane, i m sure they can come up, and i m sure there will be enough interest long term for this to happen they would look for the airplane, but it s going to be expensive and demand serious technology. reminder of the sheer scope of the size of this earth. not just that, but the remarkable feat that is air travel and the fact we do this every day. extraordinary. airline captains latane campbell, karen pellicone, ross aimer. that s all in for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts now. good evening, chris. thanks to you at home for
the jetliner was flying in the dark. it would have had to find a way to land without getting word out despite its massive size and the worldwide effort to locate it. there s no one that understands exactly how difficult that would be than the people who fly these sorts of planes. joining me now, latane campbell. 14 years of experience flying international. captain karen pellicone. pilot for another major u.s. commercial airline and ross amer. he spent five years flying the boeing 777. now ceo of aero consulting. ross, let me start with you. in the dark, with no ground control and presumably, it appears, certain automatic functions of the plane turned off, could you get this thing to ground in any way? or is that just an impossible task? no, chris. it s a simple thing for a pilot of that caliber that gets to fly a 777. that aircraft has onboard
flew out toward penang on the western coast of malaysia, out of the straits of malacca and the pings they received from the engine data aligned almost perfectly with an airway heading northwest toward sri lanka. i want to talk about that theory. but first, karen, i wanted to ask you if there s been a lot of confusion about what exactly the transponder is. it s a frequency that s in there in the cockpit you can set. have you ever had occasion as a pilot to turn the transponder off? is there some aspect of that that doesn t seem as incriminating or mysterious or bizarre as it appears to lay folks like me? procedures are to turn on the transponder right before we take off and then we turn it off after we land. i don t see any reason to turn it off en route at all. it sends out a signal so the air traffic control can see where you are. procedures are to turn on the have you ever had an occasion where you lost a transponder for a reason where there was some
if i were a betting man, i d be looking at the deepest part of the indian ocean which is very deep, by the way, right now. that seems to be if the plane did go down, that seems to be the likely place and the sheer size of that makes that difficult. karen, do you agree with what ross was saying before this basic principle of how confident you as a pilot would be under these conditions to be able to land that plane if there wasn t some catastrophic mechanical failure, if you had to get it down, you could? absolutely. we have onboard computers. we can type in the destination. it s kind of like using your iphone and google maps. follow where you need to go. there was nothing wrong with the airplane, it sounds like. it was just the transponder. there should be no difficulty getting it somewhere. ross, every time that we ve had big, catastrophic commercial air disasters, there has been a kind of engineering response to it or regulatory response to it. and, of course, that s part, right