vice president at gebhart government affairs. great to see you both again. let me start with you on this, scott. your thoughts first of all, on the circumstances we ve seen tonight. last we spoke of course it was mh-370 and the question was how does an airplane just disappear. are we in any familiar territory here? because once again we have an airplane that disappears. and so far no sign of it. i think early on i hope that is not the case. with the malaysia flight we had an issue where the pilot had signed off. and then we had a radar track of it flying back over the peninsula. here we have a pilot asking to go up to a higher elevation and then losing contact with the aircraft. so i think the similarities just are not there for this flight. but it s still very alarming that we haven t really seen anything of it yet. what does it tell you scott,
and so far no sign of it. i think early on i hope that is not the case. with the malaysia flight we had an issue where the pilot had signed off. and then we had a radar track of it flying back over the peninsula. here we have a pilot asking to go up to a higher elevation and then losing contact with the aircraft. so i think the similarities just are not there for this flight. but it s still very alarming that we haven t really seen anything of it yet. what does it tell you scott, that there was no distress call? it tells me a couple things. it tells me one that either something catastrophic happened in the air that the pilots had no knowledge of or could have done anything about. or secondly, it could have been something where the pilots were focusing on trying to fly that aircraft and just never got ahold of it again and crashed into the ocean. we talked last time, i remember, and the pilots were telling me when you re up there it s aifuate navigate and communicate. and comm
that could have happened inadvertently. having a pilot asking for a different altitude and being denied is common. there s a lot of airplanes in that part of the world flying at any one point in time, so that s common. but if you do see the airplane climbing and losing speed, that would indicate he was in an updraft. trace: and possibility this thing might have stalled. we keep going back to the air france crash in 2009 where they were in bad weather didn t know what air speed was and, in essence, the plane just stalled because the pilots couldn t figure out what was going on. any chance you think that might have happened here? there s always a chance of that happening. we really won t know until we find the black boxes which probably will be fairly soon. then we ll know. these kinds of things have happened before. we had an a-320 that was owned by air new zealand that crashed several years ago because of some of the instrumentation that froze due to water in it. that could have happ
is it possible it s still flying or very unlikely that that is a scenario, that it has first of all, it wouldn t have had that much fuel or enough fuel to get from indonesia up to singapore and an alternative and enough fuel to get back again. but certainly it would have been fuel exhausted many hours by now. and the issue, i mean could it of a run out of fuel during the flight. highly unlikely. what we re looking for here is the pilot giving some sort of warning, some sort of may day, and what we have is a pilot asking for higher altitude because of bad weather. and that s where the starting point has to be in putting the jigsaw puzzle together on what might have happened to that plane. all right. richard quest, cnn aviation correspondent. richard thank you so much. we ll be speaking with you
pretty fresh out of flight school. and i m just curious, as a pilot asking you in an emergency situation, if we don t know what kind of emergency happened onboard this particular plane, would you rather have someone who was a little more veteran, a little more experienced or younger and fresh out of school and fresh with procedure? this sounds like a trick question. not a trick question. i think everybody would go for the more experienced pilot. i think everybody would vote for the more experienced pilot. but actually, all airlines have safety procedure training. each aircraft has its own procedure for a crew, so this procedure isn t built for one pilot. the crew has a hand in it. each emergency activity has its own procedure list. and so pilots and co-pilots, no matter what they re training, they have trained extensively for this. there are checklists that need to be run through and these simulations are practiced in-flight simulators. just because a co-pilot doesn t