that was left brian todd is hearing from the first responders, and so as the investigators are looking at or looking for at this point, miles? well, in is a tough one, kate. clearly, it impacted, and it ran out of gas at 4,000 feet and then just went straight down like a lawn dart. so it would have impacted with tremendous speed and not a lot of big pieces left as a result of this. this is an aircraft which is not a charter aircraft. it flies under part 91 which is just general aviation rules, and so there is no requirement for any sort of flight data recorder or cockpit recorder, and it could be possible on the plane or retrofitted later, and so this is a difficult one to solve, and maybe they will find the smoke gun piece which shows that some sort of valve in the pressurization system gave way causing an insidious loss of
so the aircraft arrives at the location, and then for some reason appears to be making a direct return flight to its point of origin. maybe there is something about that particular configuration of that flight management system which makes it go home in those situations or maybe there is a stray way point or meaning that the original point of origin in there, but it is rather odd, and of course, that is the direction which took it right over our nation s capital which has some highly restricted and prohibited air space as you know. scrambling the fighter jets and the sonic boom which drew so many people s attention to this situation, is that how the response is supposed to unfold when an aircraft goes into the restricted air space over d.c.? yeah. that s the post-9/11 plan. it is a good exercise frankly
and proof that the protection which was, you know, really put in place post 9/11 exists, and they cannot scramble or intercept the aircraft that is responding to the nation s capital, and we should point out that an aircraft at 34,000 feet didn t ever present a threat to the nation s capital, and as it headed in the direction, the military did exactly what it is supposed to do, and the fact that, you know, six fighters from three bases responded, and they were to fire flares and trying to get the attention of the occupants of the aircraft proves the system works, that is good news. if no one ever made contact, the officials made with the pilot, it looks like a ghost plane situation, what we are also hearing from some of the first responders from the ground is that there is very little debris left including the crater
start with the flight path which has people scratching their heads here, because it is taking off from tennessee and headed bound for long island and then obviously, it never landed, and then heads back down the northeast, and then heads back obviously over d.c. and crashing in virginia and what does that flight path tell you? it is a lot of pilots are scratching their heads over this one, kate. it appears that what we have is a ghost plane, and some sort of depressurization event likely, rapid or maybe slow, which caused pilot to be incapacitated and also rendered the passengers unconscious. so the aircraft would have had a flight path to islip and programmed into the computer, and the flight management system, and the airplane dutifully flew to islip, but there is nothing in that preprogrammed plan that would allow for a descent without human intervention.