safe. notable comments from richard quest and les abin there. investigators continue to try to figure out what caused the crash in ethiopia this week minutes after takeoff. investigators are analyzing the black boxes to see if there is a link between that crash and the lion air crash in october. david mackenzie is live in ethiopia at the site of the disaster. give us the latest. good morning. there is a small group of forensic investigators behind me in white. they are waiting to access the scene to carefully go through to find evidence of what happened and why this brand new plane crashed into the hillside behind me. investigators told me they believe the plane could have come in very vertically. because of the deep nature of the crater and the relatively small area of the debris field speaking about that
the debris found, we re told appears to be a wing flap. you re looking at video of this found on this remote island in the indian ocean. investigators say, let me be crystal clear, it is way too soon to know definitively if it belongtd to that missing 777. let me bring you up to speed on the whole story. of course you ll remember this airplane disappeared after taking off march of 2014 from kuala lumpur in malaysia. it was supposed to go to beijing. aviation experts believe the plane went down somewhere in the indian ocean. 239 passengers and crew presumed dead so let me bring in cnn s analyst david sousie and les abin and let me begin with you. how do they even begin to figure it out if it s em2850?
that s being said, it s not something that when you look at it you say, look this plane should not have been flying. yes, it s an older aircraft. it had many hours on it but still, many aircraft out there are still flying at this age. we don t believe at this point that age will be an issue. we understand it underwent a maintenance tech just yesterday and underwent a larger maintenance check in 2013. so it really just makes this mystery even deeper because you know it had been looked at by these engineers the day before anderson. thank you for joining us rene. now our panel. richard quest. cnn aviation analyst, les abin. former ntsb chair, and analyst david soucie former investigative and author of malaysia airlines 360, why it disappeared and why it s a matter of time before it happens again. richard, at this point, what makes sense to you?
very little. the nature of the plane, it was in cruise the safest part of the flight. it was flying in extremely sophisticated airspace. the control. and it was a first class airline, first world airline. german wings owned by lufthansa and to rene s point, remained under the tactic which is the industry s standard. there is no difference between german wings and lufthansa wings and other planes. german wings has been a child of lufthansa going backwards and forward for years. it s now a crucially important part of lufthansa. so no, it s lufthansa group through and through. les, to you, does anything make sense? what possible explanation is there for this? there s a lot of disturbing things to me. the lack of communication richard and i were talking about prior to when we got on air. you know what i would like to know is what the communication was like all the way up to the
it crashed into the water, the debris can move in very, very wide circles. and also there have been crashes where there hasn t been much debris, even though there is debris on the ocean floor. it s hit or miss what will or will not float. and the 777 is tough. i used to be an aviation professor. and i would show is a film in my class of the 777 when it was broke. they actually broke one intentionally, and they flexed the wings to the point it would break away from the body. it wasn t a full 90 degrees up, but i would say it s a full 70 degrees. it s a very tough airplane. a lot of it might remain intact. but les, to have the landing where that would happen and then under the pressure that it goes down that it wouldn t split, there hasn t been a day in the search so far. forget the cyclone that came through where the waves haven t been a few feet. you control land a plane in waves of the five, six feet? you can. it s a difficult feat you. land parallel there is a technique to do it.