reference. calm seas, glassy water, anything like that you re going to have a very difficult time judging depth. 200 feet per minute on the rate of descent on the vert kl speed. in the middle of the ocean if you don t have an altimeter setting you don t have a frame of reference. you only have your bsi. i forget what your question was. mitch, i think you just made a brilliant point which is if the pilots were in control, they d never let the situation happen where they d actually run out of fuel. they d realize they had no other option and they d make a powered approach on to the ocean. i think that s a brilliant point you just made. i m going to add one extra question to that, mitch. that s this. with our brand-new map we received today that shows a very curious route, skirting the northern part of indonesia and then arcing back around southward and flying on for several hours southward to the south indian ocean, is there any circumstance that you can imagine where there would be
to mitch cosado and marty savidge in the flight simulator to come up with a program whereby we would figure out the fuel burn and the length of distance that the 777 would have traveled before it would actually effectively create a splash zone and if we re even in the right vicinity. i m switching gears. we reprogrammed something a little bit different. in fact, the reprogramming gentlemen i think you were able to do in the time for this moment was the soft water landing. the reason i wanted to ask you about this as well was because there have been a lot of people who ve been curious about why the eperbs did not go off when they hit water. why we found no debris if perhaps that plane landed intact. i m going to turn it over to the pilot who speaks far more eloquently than i do about this to ask the appropriate question to what to program for the soft water landing. colonel kay. hi, hitch and marty. michael again. how are you doing? good. we re in the dark. we had to do that to give
intending for anything other than crashing that plane? would anyone be trying to land gently in the spot where that plane on our map is being shown to have gone down? i can t imagine a scenario where they would be i mean, of course, there are scenarios where you have to ditch. a bird in the engine like what happened in the hudson. but with a healthy airplane, i can t imagine you just deciding to ditch. it doesn t make any sense. there were a lot of airports in the north they could have gone to if they had an emergency that were closer. they actually spent more time going down south in the indian ocean. why? to ditch, why? you have more options up north. if you had an option anywhere between that turn, that first turn which was the last thing we saw, you know, actually registering with that plane, why on earth would it go to search trouble for such a remote spot to generally land the aircraft. mitch and marty, thank you. just an invaluable with that simulator and helping us to und