implications if there are inspections that need to take place or any additional information operators need to have. david, when you look at the debris field, the lack of fire, the lack of smoke, i don t know if that s the pictures are old, but does it tell you anything? well, it does tell me that it was a singular point of primary impact. it appears to be two scattered points. meaning the aircraft did kind of skim or break apart just before it hit its main scatter point. but at this point, this type of accident, what s happening in this realm is that the aircraft not only explodes as it hits the ground, but it kicks back. there s a kickback effect. and those debris pieces that are coming back are intersecting and colliding with the aircraft that s going forward. this all happens within less than a second but all happens together. that s why you see these horribly shattered pieces of aircraft debris, the good side of this is the fact the passengers on board would have had no idea, n
impact. it appears to be two scattered points. meaning the aircraft did kind of skim or break apart just before it hit its main scatter point. but at this point, this type of accident what s happening in this realm is that the aircraft not only explodes as it hits the ground but it kicks back. there s a kickback effect. and those debris pieces that are coming back are intersecting and colliding with the aircraft that s going forward. this all happens within less than a second but all happens together. that s why you see these horribly shattered pieces of aircraft debris, the good side of this is the fact the passengers on board would have had no idea no clue what was coming other than they were descending descending. may not have known whether to prepare for impact or not. but the only good side of this is that it happened in less than a second. certainly not ability to recognize what was actually happening to them on board. david, you re saying not only, so the plane, as it impacts
the biggest pieces are most likely the center parts of the wings. most of the debris that s in colorful pieces the pieces that have red are from the tail of the aircraft. they are painted in manner that has color on the tail. those are the ones that survived which is typical of an aircraft this type. david, you hear about the size of the debris itself and what happened. is it your belief this plane crashed in air or broke up upon impact with that mountain and if so did everyone in your view die on impact quickly, suddenly? yeah at this point it looks as if it was from the impact of the ground. there s two scatter points which would indicate it hit once and broke into two, a second section. the second section had a second scatter point.
overlooking an important area. tell b tell us about that. well, there s a part between the seafloor and the top but we think about collecting debris only on the surface and what s down below. the problem with that is the fact that there s a lot of buoyant material, especially on an airbus. so if it s attached to metal, this debris could be floating anywhere in between there as it reached its buoyancy surface so it may not surface or go all the way to the bottom but the good thing about that is that debris is not affected by wind and the sea is a little more predictable as far as which way it s going. those might be some of the best clues if they are able to find some of that material because today they are start the underwater search. hopefully they ll find some of that material and from there determine where the aircraft may have gone down and its initial scatter point. it s interesting because you
with the bluefin. that makes sense. does it make sense to you that they are now really putting a sea state on searching for debris in this surrounding area? you know, i think so. you mean not giving up hope, it s not quitting. no, i don t think that it is. i think they ve got to focus everything they have on that local area. but as far as why they re continuing or why they re not on the debris it s probably so spread out, remember, the reason we started that, the primary reason of doing the debris search is to hone in on where they think the primary impact point is, or the scatter point. there s not a there are clues you can get from floating debris but the real answers, what we want to know why this happened, those answers are where it hit the water, where it is. not in the debris itself. so, you know, a t this point the debris eventually will show up somewhere but there s not the a-ha moment from the floating debris typically. it s usually from what we find in the black b