hundreds of feet at an unusually fast speed. panic could be heard in the captain s voice as he said, break, break, request back to home, request vector for landing. that was three minutes into the flight. all contact was lost two minutes later. now, i m giving you time cues because i want you to look at the graph. it shows how the ethiopia airlines flight followed the same erratic pattern to my eye as the lion air jet. okay. and we have bracketed the relevant time section, okay, because, yes, in the beginning it is different. you see an angle of ascent on the top graph that is different than the one on the bottom, but do you see in that same interval in there s a precipitous drop, okay. then you see a flagging pattern and we all know what happened after that. so this is what has alarmed investigators the most as they wait for data from the black boxes.
now, i m giving you time cues because i want you to look at the graph. it shows how the ethiopia airlines flight followed the same erratic pattern to my eye as the lion air jet. okay. and we have bracketed the relevant time section, okay, because, yes, in the beginning it is different. you see an angle of ascent on the top graph that is different than the one on the bottom, but do you see in that same interval in there s a precipitous drop, okay. then you see a flagging pattern and we all know what happened after that. so this is what has alarmed investigators the most as they wait for data from the black boxes. i want to bring in cnn aviation analyst miles o brian. always a pleasure to see you. good to see you. a pleasure to have you on the new show. yes. keep that graph up. am i getting this wrong that those similar segments and drops are worth being worried about? absolutely. you have this entirely correct. you don t have to be a rocket scientist.
new morning, questions about what took so long for the united states to ground the boeing 737 max 8 and the max 9 passenger planes. we learned overnight that the faa found similarities between this weekend s doomed ethiopian airlines flight and the crash of a lion air jet back in october. so with the rest of the world taking much quicker acts, why was the u.s. so slow to move? tom foreman is live in washington with much more on this. tom. reporter: john, officials here is a what they needed was some evidence, and they got it yesterday. they say they studied the satellite tracks and the more they looked at them and got more information, the more this crash in ethiopia looked like the air lion crash in indonesia last fall. and that s what it took. after days of resisting, the
jo joining us now, miles o brien, the science correspondent for pbs news hour. walk us through these. this is the ethiopian airlines flight and the lion air crash five months ago. what do you see here that s similar? first of all, top line, this is a graph which depicts terror. this was a wild ride on both aircraft, total roller coaster. just so you know, we re talking about here this is the vertical rate of speed. so how fast it s going up or down, not across the ground. look at this first peak here. shortly after takeoff going up to about 3,000 feet per minute, which is about normal for a 737. but then apparently the crew was trying to struggle to bring it down, to control that rate of assent. every graph line you see here represents in excess of 90 pounds of pressure on the control yoke. so these crews were battling actually in a physical struggle in both cases but the similarities are there. you see the big peaks, the
understand the cause of the accidents. it will impact three major u.s. airlines which normally fly hundreds of flights using max 8 and 9 jets daily. the bottom line is boeing has to figure out whether or not onboard software is for some reason causing these planes to dive toward the ground. to do that they have to look at the flight data recorder and the voice recorder. they re both in france now finally being analyzed. but until they get those answers, officials here say those planes will remain parked. alisyn. very good to know. thank you so much. so what does this data tell us about the similarities between the ethiopian airlines flight and the lion air crash? there s the graph. miles osbri brien is standing b explain these graphs to us. for every 5 lbs you lose, alli® can help you lose two to three more by preventing about 25% of the fat you eat from being absorbed. for the only fda-approved otc weight loss aid, try alli®.