matter what was going on, if they had not heard from the aircraft in the air or from the crew on the ground saying they had an emergency somewhere and landed somewhere else, that there was probably not a great deal of hope that they re going to find the air flight in one piece. is there ever obviously when you suspect an aircraft may have gone down, and we don t know what has happened in this situation yet. is there any reason to think terrorism outside influence on this aircraft? well, i mean, as i said earlier there are only a couple of reasons that an aircraft would go as we call go completely dark and just you know, disappear out of the sky with no radio, no radar, nothing. and certainly there could have been an explosion on board. for whatever reason, we don t know. but again, there is not very many causes that could have been so catastrophic that this crew
this morning on sunday was around 11:41 a.m. eastern time that it departed. about two hours later it went missing, lost from the radar. it was about well, short time ago this evening that they reported that the flight was missing. made it public. they said that they had tried to communicate with the pilot by various means, unsuccessfully. on the phone with us among others tonight has been scott hamilton. he is a 777 boeing expert and has been very interesting to talk to about this very safe aircraft. scott, you know, almost everybody listening to this program right now watch thinking program has been in an aircraft. and you get on airplanes these days and even people who are fearful of flying have to be comforted by the stats. knowing how safe airline travel is. however, once in a while you know, statistics are great until you become one of them. and it is going to be i think
i have seen a little bit of light precipitation over south and central china, reports of that. but that is well below the flight level. and skies were clear with light winds, the temperature, 26 degrees celsius, which is about 26 degrees, there is no bad weather that i can see for the flight path on the malaysian plane. the flight reached 32,000 feet which is expected if you re two and a half hours into the flight. so there is nothing that i can see on radar or on any other weather sources that you know would lead to a determination of weather being a problem, megyn. certainly, i ll keep an eye on it. and i m sure you know, your guests can talk about that clear air turbulence, from my studies you can t see that on radar. it is impossible to detect with the naked eye and very difficult to detect with conventional radar. right, but it is helpful to know if the weather at least as
no idea where the plane is. to the average lay person you think how could that be? well, that is why i think it probably had made it past the coast of vietnam. you know, once they get out over open ocean a certain distance they are not within radar coverage of land-based radar. the curvature of the earth just prevents that. so i m guessing they were probably out over open ocean but even if they weren t, when you think about it megyn, you know, they are still to this day finding crash sites from the vietnam war in the jungles of vietnam. it is a very densely jungled country with not a lot of population. so it is possible certainly this plane would have gone down in some remote stretch of vietnam. but i m guessing it probably went down somewhere over the south china sea, you know, even a couple of hundred miles off the coast they would not have had radar coverage. uh-huh. we continue to wait the press conference with the official information from those who are trying to get answers f
the thing to do is, i m not picking on you or anybody else, but those are the kinds of questions that need to be raised and talked about in a logical, reasonable time frame, not i just heard the report about the search and rescue teams with the dogs. they re out there working their rear ends off trying to do everything they can. and the dogs, for example, those dogs will get depressed. those dogs get tired, they need rest just like the first responders so with need to go through what is called the response time. we need to go through the recovery time and then there s the time neil: no doubt, michael. i certainly didn t mean to be flippant but i want to switch again to a dallas area map on radar, just showing what is building or potentially building around that neck of the woods and there were reports earlier on that dallas independent school district did not want to release students early, fearing that conditions were too severe in the area to do so, and reports that winds w