we don t have a system up and running, the communications, it is entertainment. we re within the limitations of that. understandable. understand. stand by. i want to get to retired captain, navy captain bobby:y. we continue to talk about the scenario as if this was something that happened as it was going back, over land. we forget that, we shouldn t forget there are searchers out there, planes going out now into the southern indian ocean now facing some very big challenges, trying to find any sort of sign of this aircraft. right. and as we look at all these different scenarios, right now we have all these resources tied up looking at the current scenario that we ve all been talking about for at least a week, maybe longer. and we have a lot of ships and aircraft tied up. and we have people actually out in some pretty nasty weather who
its path. given what we know now, though, has this changed your analysis of the situation? jim, very little has changed. i mean, the most important has changed, if there is one, is the information about what the uk was able to come up with about position of the aircraft and just before it hit the water. but that s just one analysis. we really have a whole lot to analyze before we come up with anything conclusive. for example, exactly how long did it take to go from 35,000 to 12,000 feet? why 12,000 feet? what was the idea there? if it went down as rapidly as i think it did, they probably would have had to have used a speed brake to do that. once they got to 12,000 feet, was the crew able to respond properly? if they were, they would relax that speed brake which i think they had to do if they were going to fly for another several hours. and flying for another several
undermine the air foil. and down you go. i think they can a 9,000 per foot descent. this is about what you would expect to not overstress the airplane. so in that hectic time, the captain would likely take control of the aircraft. the first officer would be responsible for the other duties including the communication. and that is where something went wrong. and why did it fail? why did the transponder fail? that is the big part of the mystery at this point. part of this is descend to 10,000 feet where you can get enough air to breathe. then you continue your trouble-shooting. so in a dramatic form, watching martin and mitchell. you know it is a simulator but it is gut wrenching watching that stuff. and you can imagine the scenario in the real world.
and started the descent. david, this new information coming in. the question is, where is this plane? well, it is still significant. this piece of information for a lot of reasons. the one reason, the one thing that concerns me, even if the pilots didn t have time to communicate this. there are other systems on the aircraft that automatically report it. again, i m referring to the eight car system. so why that did not report it, try to connection and make an attempt to connect and report that something was going wrong. that s what concerns me a lot. the other thing is that if they were not able to communicate. the thing that s common between them, the vhf and the vhf radios is the communications bus which powers the communications systems. although it is two different buses temperature, there is one common bus that could potentially trip that up. that concerns me a little bit. that could answer why they
that reliably. i want to hold off on that until i figure it out that there was distress going on in that airplane. bobby? from a search and recovery perspective, we ve just got to get our hands around this and see how this might affect where we need to look. and what we need to do about it. and be careful about how we handle this. ken christianson? focus on e radar date, a where it was lost and follow i think you said don t effect on on where it was lost. you said focus on the radar data, correct? the data that you have, that s where you need to go. and then you ll find the aircraft. mark? well, 12,000 foot is the altitude du jour. we don t know how quickly that came down. we don t know if it was human intervention or a mechanical