us down, kind of a dive. nose down. again, all the alarms that you re getting. bells and whistles warning you you re going way too fast. you re going to overspeed. doubtful they did anything like this. there s the ocean straight ahead. so pull it back. remember, if it really was over an hour and 40 minutes, that deced descent could have been very, very gradual. so what we re saying here is those actions do not indicate emergency. it s not a sharp turn to go to some emergency landing. and it s not necessarily a steep descent to get down for the passengers to breathe. it could have been a slow descent and a gradual turn. that s what the simulator tells us. okay. stand by. don t go anywhere, martin. i want to bring our panel back in now to discuss this. mary schiavo, of course, is with us. mark weiss is with us. miles o brien, steve
this is a difficult one not only because of the awful pictures we see and the nature, we know quite a lot about the last moments. we know the weather. it was blustery, the windy conditions, not terrible but normal in kazan this time of the year. we know the plane had made one approach, was on the second approach when the incident happened. now because of the video we re seeing we know the trajectory at which the plane came out of the sky. nose down, straight into the ground. they helped the investigation quite considerably in understanding the sort of reasons that might have contributed to this disaster. when you see that trajectory, it was basically vertical, what does that suggest? what it suggests is a complete lack of control and power. there s no forward momentum. so planes tend to if a plane falls out of the sky it tends to go like that. not in this case. you re starting to narrow down, we don t want to go into the areas of ramp and speculation
coverage beginning at 10:00 with melissa harris-perry and the ed show and at 1:00 p.m. eastern with politics nation. the national transportation safety board is currently investigating after the 777 landed at san francisco international airport yesterday. two chinese citizens died. dozens injured and many taken to the local hospitals. 307 were on board. everyone is now accounted for and here s how one eyewitness describes what happened. i was sitting in my hotel room on the fourth floor and i heard a boom and i knew something was wrong. i immediately turned around and saw the aircraft tumbling nose down. it was like the nose of the plane was in the dirt and the tail was up in the air and it was kind of twisting at the same time, and that s when it came to rest in a big dust ball where
is the fact i say fact, speculation that the cargo in the airplane probably shifted as it rotated to take off. that happened before a few times in history. if that happens and enough stuff moves back in the airplane, it can move it out of the center of gravity envelope. in that case it s going to be difficult, if not impossible for the crew to keep the nose down, keep enough forward air speed over the wings. the problem is what you saw in this video, if there is not enough air speed over the wings you basically become a big piece of medal. this is a civilian flight. i ve been on military cargo planes and they strap everything down for that very reason to prevent any large cargo shipment, vehicles from shifting on that plane. wouldn t that be the case even if this were a civilian cargo flight? you can absolutely guarantee the load masters on this had everything down or in other words had it tied down. the fact is that if one thing
then at this point he is literally stalling, trying to roll the airplane into some latitude that makes sense. but at that point, you see the right wing. this is what we know to do in a large aircraft if we re trying to gain control of too great a pitch. if it doesn t done soon enough, letting the nose come down and trying to regain air speed, you become basically 6 or 7 or 800,000 pounds of metal falling to the earth. at this point, the airplane is absolutely not arrest owe dynamic. it is simply a balance stick thing falling to the ground. and at that point the pilots know there is nothing you can do. i they would have flown to the very last micro second. that s what pilots do. by the same token, they would have known there wasn t a lot of room to recover. this is actually what we again call a stall spin accident. but there is no room really for a spin to develop. i think the pilot was probably trying to roll the wings over so he could get that nose down, but there just wasn t en