incident has had a chilling effect on israel s diplomatic relations in europe. we will have more on the mossad coming up later in the situation room. stand by. we have other developments. meanwhile, the breaking news we are covering from texas, a fiery crash of a small plane into an office building in austin. the state capital appears to be deliberate. what led the pilot the carry out such a violent act? we will talk to a former fbi profiler about the suicide note that the pilot apparently left on the internet. okay, class, our special guest is here ellen page. hi, ellen! hi, ellen! hi, ellen! hi, ellen! we re going on a field trip to china! wow. [ chuckles ] when i was a kid, we we would just go to the the farm. [ cow moos ] [ laughter ] no, seriously, where are you guys going? ni hao! ni hao! ni hao! ni hao! ni hao! ni hao! ni hao! ni hao!
this is georgetown municipal airport, and this is the type of plane that he was flying. there are people on the ground there who saw him taxi out and leave. we don t know much about it other than he owns the plane and took off from here according to authorities, and he flew more or less according to them a straight path. i want you to consider this. this is the airport up here, the strike point down here. he took off around 9:40 in the morning according to authorities, and they revised this a moment ago from 10:00 a.m., the time of the crash to 9:55 a.m. the crash. we don t know if takeoff is taken from liftoff or taxi time. we know that the plane could go up to 170 miles an hour. it was 20 miles from the airport to the crash site and authorities say that based on all of that and their own tracking, they believe that this was pretty much a straight flight down. he did not meander or loop all over. finally, he went to the actual crash site, itself, wolf, and that is what the authorities
you mentioned after the new york crash in october of 2006, cory lidle, the rules changed for flying around municipal areas, especially new york city. with the new rules in new york and no new york area, it is monitored and tight area to fly. and i would say that i would not fly over the hudson river, for example. a place like austin is it almost impossible to have that kind of monitoring like have you in new york after the lidle crash? austin is a mid-sized airport. there s not the same amount of monitoring taking place, new york, chicago or washington. and it is pretty tough when you see something like this happen. and be able to catch it on time. i want to talk to you about another type of monitoring. reagan national airport has different rules for small planes, private planes that want to fly in. we have an animation showing the flight path into reagan national. have you a knowledge of that being a flight instructor in this area. small plane pilot have to do to be able to
this crash could potentially have been prevented. we are joined by peter goals. former managing director for the national transportation safety board. peter, thanks very much for coming in. you saw last several hours, we have all been watching this. what goes through your mind? could anything have been done to prevent this kind of horrible tragedy? i think it is awful tough to try to screen from this. suicide and aviation communities a little more common than people might imagine. couple of times a year this happens and maybe one or two more times you think it might be. in this kind of event, i don t think there s anything that you can do to prevent it. air traffic controllers is there anything they can do to monitor a situation like this? if they are flying in an uncontrolled air space or if they are not responding, i think if a pilot is bent on self-destruction, the they are going to be able to accomplish it. correct me if i am wrong, they might be more mental
cause well, there was a second alarm, so it is about 45 firefighters. do you think this is the end of general aviation as we know it? absolutely not. as the police chief said, this is not a reason to panic, and it is an isolated event and not tied to overseas terrorist organizations, and we have to be careful how to balance that. but i think it is an issue obviously that congress needs to look at in terms of protecting not only federal buildings, but the american people. and so there you have it. the news conference from austin, texas, local authorities saying that this appears to be intentional, and this crash into building a singular act according to the police chief of the facility targeted. he insists it is no cause for alarm and looks like the incident is overwith, although two individuals are unaccounted for. the pilot is believed to be joseph stack, 53 years old, and one federal employee who worked in the building unaccounted for. we will have much more on what