initiated. there s a question right here. adam reiss, msnbc. based on the interview you ve done so far today, what is the preliminary the preliminary conclusion you can draw in terms of what caused this crash. and you wanted to look at a particular part of the window, what did you see that raised suspicion? a couple of questions there. what conclusions can we draw? the answer to that is easy. we do not draw conclusions at this stage of an accident investigation. we re here to collect information. we will draw conclusions at the completion of the investigation, which will be after a very thorough and comprehensive investigation. regarding the damage patterns to that windshield that we are having the fbi look at it would be if you re standing in the middle of the locomotive cab
recommendations for forward-facing image recorders, and inward facing image recorders. so something that would get a video image, video and audio image of what s going on inside the locomotive cab, as well as the outward facing cameras. and of course this train did have an outward facing camera. we also feel it s important to have the inward facing cameras. that recommendation was issued in 2010 when we completed our investigation of that accident in california and the fra has implied that they do intend to act upon that recommendation. there s a lot to be done. i think over the last few days, we ve gotten a lot done.
situations like this before. have you seen situations where it wasn t operator error? we have seen situations of operator error in the past. but this one is an unusual situation. you re right, the train was at a high speed for a fairly long period of time. that s why we feel it would be important to get a firsthand account from the engineer. we ll also be doing things like obtaining cell phone records. we do that all accidents as a matter of routine. we want to know if there were distractions in the locomotive cab. we want to know how the train was actually operating. was the train performing the way that it should. we have a lot of questions, the public has a lot of questions. we intend through the course of this investigation to get to the bottom of it. do you have an expectation you re going to speak with the engineer today or so far have you been told no? kate, i don t think it s going to be today.
there are lots of things that could have distracted him. some of them legal, some of them illegal. such as you re not allowed to carry a cell phone, for example, into a locomotive cab, but there s only one person in these cabs running amtrak trains up and down the corridor. so he could have figured he got away with that. i don t know that and don t know if it s true or not but there s so many factors that have to be considered here. and we don t know. we know that they have asked for his phone. so we don t know if he was on his phone or even had it with him. and the man heading the ntsb
accident in northwestern spain. the engineer was talking on the phone when he drove his train around a curve at 95 miles per hour reaching twice the speed limit before it derailed killing 79 people. he survived and was charged with 79 counts of reckless homicide. now the head of the ntsb says he s going to be obtaining the engineer s cell phone records. he is looking for any distractions that could have occurred in that locomotive cab and whether the engineer suffered from any medical crisis. thank you very much. i want to bring in now the a retired amtrak engineer. he worked with amtrak for 25 years, along with paul callen. you re familiar with the rout that the train was on. and we ve just learned that the train accelerated in a period of less than a minute, about 44 seconds or so it accelerated