saying. someone did turn that aircraft. it was by hand. i suspect by the auto pilot because the navigation systems are not connected to the communication systems that have been disabled. so i m very convinced that someone took this aircraft, took it off course and flew it again with the altitude information from the wall street journal, i don t put a lot of credibility into that because i just don t believe in primary radar that much. so the fact that it went both directions, yes. let me jump in. i am not an expert here nor are most of the people watching this. so let s presume that theory is correct, that somebody, a copilot, a pilot, somebody else possibly, has taken control of this plane. they ve got to be highly skilled to do what they do. how did they then keep this plane flying for four, possibly five hours, possibly even longer without any detection? just explain to me how that physically can happen. pilots have been flying map of the earth for years, as soon as radar came
many flights. is it possible that somebody could have commandeered this plane and got as far as somewhere like pakistan as some people are suggesting? absolutely. there was enough fuel on the airplane to do that. whether without you would think that if that airplane had been over a land mass, someone s radar would have been able to pick that up. and it certainly at this point, political pressures alone, i would think, would have determined that the pakistani government or another government would have determined that the radar tapes should be shown to everybody on board. if you know what you re doing, if you know what you re doing and you re a very very smart pilot with a lot of experience, could you if you had planned it properly perhaps using simulators, who knows, could you have avoided detection by radars if you knew where they were at their most intense? well, i think you d be even with the transponder turned off, there d still be a radar pinging. you wouldn t know who y
analysis there. but what is your gut feeling with a lot of expertise in your locker about what you think is probably happened here? we have increasingly detailed theories based on very little information. it s very hard to say. it is easy to reconcile the changes in altitude given the lack of fidelity of the ra radar. the malaysians won t say how good their radar is. that s a defense secret. it s harder to reconcile the changes in direction. people will postulate, maybe there were lithium batteries on board, maybe they had a fire, progressive electrical failure. we just don t have the information we need. okay. john ostrow, that is certainly true. if we had all the information we needed we d all know what happened. clearly the reporting you ve done and the new york times and barbara starr, all excellent reporting, all coming at it from slightly different angles. if you put it all together, you put the sum of all parts
systems of taircraft from underneath the airplane? unfathomable to me. unfathomable. try to put some fathom into it for me. this airplane was flying over the ocean. radar is only good for about 200 miles from shore. so you don t have to fly at low altitude to be undetected once out get beyond the range of radar. as we discovered on 9/11 in this country and certainly in places like malaysia and thailand, there are not fighter planes waiting to scramble to chase unidentified aircraft. it just doesn t work that way. the ocean is very large, very dark and very easy to disappear into. okay. let me ask this of john ostrow. if you re on a plane and you know it s suddenly diverting off course and you re one of those passengers, again with the new technology everyone s got some kind of gadget on them. could not one of them have made any kind of e-mail, text message, bbm, whatever it may have been, to anybody else outside that plane to notify them there was a problem?