significantly more information, but will it be enough? if there is something conclusive on the 82 parameters, it will narrow the accident down to where they may not have to reconstruct the entire aircraft. reporter: they could choose to recover a few pieces and reveal the rest of the puzzle. alexandra field, cnn. cnn has learned boeing has a system to fly a plane by remote control from the ground in an emergency. as brian todd reports, the incident might have turned out differently. reporter: a lost signal. a vanished plane. on the ground, a feeling of helplehelp lessne lessness. an idea has circulated on remote control in stressful situations. in 2004, boeing applied for a patent for uninterrupt able auto
takes three days to find the bulk of the wreckage. after finding 97% of the plane, crash experts reassemble it in a long island hangar. you can place pieces of the aircraft back together again so you can see how they relate to each other and the impact related. is that kind of reconstruction still necessary? well, there is obviously debate about that. reporter: that is because data recorders like the one on flight 370 are now more sophisticated. the older model on flight 800 could record only 18 indicators. investigators needed to investigate because the data gave a partial view of what happened on board at the time of the crash. essentially, speed, altitude, heading. it was not that helpful in the determining what the probable cause was. reporter: the missing data recorder from flight 370 captures 82 separate indicators,
how do you know the satellite image from here is not connected to the same debris photographed by an airplane up there? part of it has to do with distance and time. this is 700 miles. over the period of days we re talking about here, five or six days, it would be very difficult for something to naturally follow that path. normally debris is moving out a half mile or a mile an hour. on a busy day, two or three or four, but not so much in a straight line. you need to get between four or five miles an hour for it to cover that distance in the time allotted. this is probably not connected to the other debris. if you figure out this is standalone debris that is connected to the plane, that is just the first part of the mystery. because then you have to look at where did it come from? where did it originate? if you spread a grid on the water and mark the grid where the search area was and narrow it down to where you found the
debris to create a single point out there, you then have to expand the field enormously over this amount of time over more than 20 days, to figure where it came from. because the drift patterns could be very complicated. frankly, i don t know how you put together an algorythm here. you can try. to actually lead you to the bulk of the plane is a tall, tall order. let s bring in our meteorologist karen macginnis now. you said there are good conditions for the weekend, but the window is closing here? yes, errol, we were hopeful this weather would cooperate for the aviators and those on the open waters. yes, we have seen that weather
pilot. the ground control could take away the pilots control. this would be handled by the ground. everything now the pilots try to do would be inconsequential. reporter: with the idea, pilots could flip a switch and sensors could go off in the cockpit or sensors on the cockpit doors if force were used. ground operators could take control of the plane using radio or satellite and steer to the airport. flying like a drone. if flight 370 was hijacked or a member of the crew did something to alter the path, could this have saved that plane? if they determined that it was a problem and they tried to get in touch with the pilot and co- pilot and they could not, if that system were in place, it seems as though the ground