on board, a large shipment in the cargo hold and here s part of the report from the national transportation safety board. the flight had taken off, they were 22 minutes in the flight when the flight crew members indicated to air traffic control that they experienced smoke in the cockpit and were unable to see their radios. they turned that flight around, they tried to get it back on e the. it crashed nine miles sort of the airport, 23 minutes after that first report of smoke in the cockpit. is there the possibility that something like that could have brought down malaysian air? there is and that would need to be evaluated but i think it needs to be evaluated with the security aspects of what went into that cargo hold in terms of who tendered cargo, where was it headed? what do we know about the people putting things in that cargo hold? here in the u.s., we have rules against flying of lithium ion
criminal purposes the crew and the passengers, i think that there are still questions about grund crew, fuelers and others and possibly even stowaways that may have had access to the aircraft before it took off. jon: you say we ve learned something and this technology may have been developed from things we learned in the air france 447 crash in 2009. i want to take a look at another recent crash. didn t get a lot of attention in this country because it didn t happen here but it s the crash of united parcel service flight i believe it was flight six. this is all that s left of a gigantic boeing 747, 400 series, relatively new aircraft that went down in the united arab emirates back in september of 2010. it was later determined that they had a fire in the cargo hold on the main deck, fire caused probably, authorities said, by lithium ion batteries. we know the malaysian air flight also had lithium ion batteries
try to find it before they lose the ping sound that would allow them to get the flight recorder back. and i want to go on record saying we haven t confirmed in fact that that phone call was made by the pilot at the last minute. let s talk now finally before we go, quickly if you would, the lithium ion batteries on board. they ve been known to explode. rare instances, but it did take down a ups plane a couple years ago. it did. they can catch on fire, as you right think point out, this doesn t happen very often. you know, and the problem here is, we re trying to come up with general explanations for something that in my world they call a black swan. a very, very rare event. first of all, plane s going down, that s a rare event. for whatever reason. and then this particular incident is different than virtually almost any other case of a plane going down. so we re looking for something that is rare in the category of the extremely rare. and so whatever it s going to
but myles as malaysian airlines defending its use of the lithium ion batteries on board. quoted they re not regarded as dangerous goods. i know you had a fright ening incident in a plane. i was in a hotel where a lithium ion battery lit fire and almost burned down the hotel. you can imagine the amount of juice you get in that lithium ion battery that allows you to run your laptop across country. all that juice is metered out over time. imagine it explosively coming out quickly. you ve got like virtually a rocket engine. so in the u.s. you re not supposed to check them in cargo holds of passenger aircraft period. that s the way it s supposed to be right now. if you have lithium ion batteries which i did after the fire in the hotel room, you carry them on board with you in the cabin, under your control and make sure they don t run