this thing goes into very great detail. remember, it was flying from rio to paris. it hit a very bad thunderstorm. when the tubes which are the speed sensors failed, and when they failed, the plane that thing right there the plane went into a stall. the first thing pilots are taught is you push the nose down to increase the speed and regain control. but despite the stall warning going off, some 54 seconds continuously the pilot in control continued to push up on the nose, not down, and the two other pilots also did not take corrective action until it was too late. remember this conversation from the cockpit voice recorder saying, quote, the deputy pilot: climb, climb, climb. the junior pilot, but i ve had the stick back the whole time.
devastating storm. what happened? i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. all right. look at this. this was then pf president obama us bus last august making its way through the midwest. look a this. this is now president obama s bus with a seemingly new accessory front and center. we re talking about a presidential seal. it s a bold reminder as he kicks his campaign into full gear in ohio, a major battleground state to be sure, that he has rivalled mitt romney. they are both trying to win in order to become president. at least in his part to remain president of the united states, romney s part to become president of the united states. the romney campaign though is trying to steal a bit of the thunder in the area. the president certainly didn t shy away from mixing policy with politics taking key action just hours before his speech to help bolster the economy. our white house correspondent, dan lothian, is traveling with the president in ohio right now. dan is joi
the sky. soon the plane s stall warning goes off. he keeps saying repeatedly, what s happening? what s happening? where s the captain? they call for the captain six times. yeah. reporter: we don t know why it took captain dubois more than a minute to return to the cockpit. but two sources tell abc news that he was traveling socially with an off-duty air france flight attendant. were the two together? if the pilot is distracted because he s traveling with somebody potentially, isn t that part of the investigation? i don t think it could be an explanation of accident. reporter: in the cockpit captain dubois finds a scene of utter confusion. what s happening, he asks. i don t know what s happening, answers one of the co-pilots. within seconds the plane has entered such a deep stall it s plummeting about 120 miles an hour, nose up. bonin still thinks his instruments are wrong. he asks, am i going down now? confusion has turned into chaos. with both co-pilots now trying
instead of leveling the plane off or dropping the nose, the pilot kept trying to climb. the stall warning sounded 75 times. the deputy captain finally realized what was going wrong and leveled the plane, but for some reason the junior pilot pulled the plane back up not realizing they were plummeting 11,000 feet per minute. the captain finally came back into the cockpit, you could tell there was confusion. from the cockpit voice recorder, put this on the screen. the deputy pilot says: reporter: the plane hit the water about a second after that, and now they re saying look, thousand, at the left-hand side,
of accident investigators not taking part in this french inquiry and to a lot of pilots, and a lot of them have these same concerns. megyn, one ought to say airbuses are safe, they are remark all commercial airlines are remarkably safer. they always argue, these two, about it. but maybe we can make them even safer still because the issue was why was there confusion in the cockpit? why was it not obvious what the junior pilot was doing? megyn: the flight hit turbulence, there was a stall warning. when that happens, they need to put the plane downward to descend to pick up speed to avoid the stall. this junior pilot, instead, was pulling up. he was pulling up. and the co-pilot who was more experienced than he should have seen that and should have said don t do that. you say the reason, potentially, that that didn t happen, the oversight is because the one pilot didn t know what the junior pilot was doing. yeah. the junior pilot did mention