this so there was tracking and that s what i wanted to ask mary about, if you could help us understand. we know we have our systems here the american air space in terms of how traffic is tracked. how does it work overseas? what is the chain of command? what is the communication process? it s coordinated throughout the eu and the system is very much like ours. worldwide, with air traffic control systems are very similar. they do hand off between air traffic control to air traffic control. but throughout the eu they re completely coordinated. they have open skies, so the handoff wouldn t be difficult. i think the biggest clue i just heard that they saw it disappeared from radar before it actually crashed. which would to me suggest that they were below altitude.
in the alps, in any mountains. if you re below altitude and if you re below where you re supposed to be in the sky, that s always a danger and it certainly suggests that something s wrong. particularly in mountainous regions, it suggests they were having a problem, most likely a mechanical problem. we re hearing that a distress call was picked up from this flight from this a-320 airbus. we don t obviously know yet what they said. but that that sort of fits into the narrative that you re following. that if they were below altitude they knew something was wrong. some of the facts is that it went from 38,000 feet to 24,000 feet in seven minutes. it was reported that it was descending at a rate of 3,440 feet per minute. what do those numbers mean to you? well that s a fast rate of descent. you know it s not one that would cause the plane to come
by helicopter. the helicopter pilot reporting through french authority saying that debris has been found and at an altitude of approximately 6500 feet. you know the alps at that altitude we know there are a lot of villages in the area. at that altitude what are we talking about in terms of remoteness. at that altitude it would be very difficult to get a major rescue and recovery operation off the ground quickly. a lot of it would have to be done with helicopters. there are choppers in the area. there s a lot of birds that can go up quickly. because it s an area of hiking. it s not one that regularly would deal with something like this. this is a large-scale catastrophe, mass casualty catastrophe, where you need a lot of choppers to make any sort of difference and to actually get people on the ground to sift through the debris as well and see if there are any survivors. so certainly it would be very difficult. and at that altitude you don t have anything like roads leading to there. y
paris flight a while back where they had trouble with the controllers and the training on the crew. anyone who flies the airbus seshl has gotten information about that and they were supposed to receive the retraining if there was any issue there, concerning keeping up the air speed particularly in the weather. but there s no indication that that s a problem right now. so the 320 has a really long track record widely used around the world. many many in use in the united states. so it could be an issue with maintenance, it could be an issue with cargo in the cargo hold there s so many things that could go wrong. but mid flight is a really rare time to have it 95% of accidents happen on takeoff or landing or on approach to landing or takeofftake off climb to altitude. we ve learned so much having
itself. they say the plane was in distress at 10:45 a.m. local time. about 5:45 there on the east coast. they said that it disappeared from the radar about that time. so they must have gotten the distress call shortly after the airplane disappeared off the radar. they say, this comes from a spokesman from the french interior ministry. he said the amount of deceased might be very high. that doesn t bode well at all. at the same time the french president fron kois hollande has tweeted out his sympathy for the families of the victims. he said i want to express my solidarity to the families of the victims of the air crash, we are in mourning for this tragedy. again, the french authorities also saying that it s highly unlikely that anybody would have survived that crash in that mountainous terrain. that also meshes chris, with what you ve been saying with the helicopter pilots are saying it seems to have gone down in very difficult, very mountainous terrain. it appears to be terrain that th