a catastrophic loss of the aircraft. there would be no further data. so what has to happen now is what happens. the second thing that happens in u.s. crash investigations, the first thing is to send the go team. the second thing is to gather every piece of data, every maintenance report, every engine speck, every engine log, plane log. every piece of data about the maintenance operation, performance of that plane and study it. that needs to be done next. and if this data exists and it hasn t been provided to the investigators, frankly, i think that s almost criminal. you are echoing what bob francis told us earlier. he s a former ntsb investigator. now u.s. investigators are on the scene in malaysia and i ve been asking everybody, how much input do you think they really have? well, they are not in charge. there s a treaty, international civil aviation icao. it sets forth how this should be done. the u.s. follows it. most nations follow it but it is
the 777 is a very big aircraft. no question about it. about 200 feet wingtip to wi wingtip on this plane. to get something this big or three pieces that big out of this, not really that easy. so you are correct. we ll move the airplane now and look at the space again. once again we re back to all these competing questions about what happened. we have the image from the chinese which has been discounted. the mystery of where the plane went. the errant radar ping which drew the whole search over into the strait of malacca. it s all very confusing. and i want to point out something, carol. you talk about how far this area goes when we talk about the big map and the idea that perhaps this has expanded from india, i m going to turn way over here. from india all the way down toward australia. that sort of thing. a map like this is not really accurate because the proportion of the places is off. to give you an idea, if in fact, this were true, this thing the
on this rolls royce question, whether the engines continued to send telemetry and data via the a-card system, it s possible they could have done except if the if the plane had kept flying but we ve heard from the we just heard from the malaysian transport minister that they did not receive any information. so this i mean, put it as blunt as i can, carol, the wall street journal quoting unnamed sources at rolls royce in britain says they continue to receive data. the malaysians say they did not. so it seems that the a-car system, this is the automatic reporting system which the plane transmits morning, noon and night while it s in flight stopped at the same time as everything else did at 0127. so you are saying bluntly the wall street journal report is wrong? i m not saying it. the malaysian department, the
malaysian government and chinese government, the two involved in this. chinese had so many on the plane. it was a malaysian airliner. it s frustrating for us, but must be for the investigators as well. there s so much inflicting information and interpretations of that information. ntsb and faa are on the scene to get more involved. can you tell us more about that? i think that s key. we have heard from the authorities in malaysia a call for help. even on interpreting the data. they had trouble interpreting it and lack of confidence in it, right, because when they got the radar data that showed the plane took the turn, they still kept their search areas on both sides of the peninsula. the initial search area close to where the plane lost contact and also here. they have questions about where it lost data.
flight 370. initial reports said police were looking for evidence of strange behavior by the pilot in days before the flight took off. malaysian transportation minister said those reports were not true. even so, the question remains when does this go from a missing plane search to a criminal investigation? cnn law enforcement analyst tom join us now. good morning tom. good morning carol. when would it go to a criminal investigation? does the absence of evidence does that lead to a criminal investigation too? carol the investigation began when the plane disappeared. this is kind of the equivalent. if you report your child stolen or missing to the police or fbi. they don t tell you when we find the body we ll start the investigation. it begins immediately. that s what happened in this case. the fbi has agents assigned full time in kuala lumpur and every